Buying an email list sounds like a quick way to grow your revenue potential. But it is a huge waste of time and money. In this post, we’ll share 8 reasons why you should never buy an email list (and what to do instead).

What Does It Mean to “Buy Email List”?

Why You Should Never Buy an Email List

Don’t Buy Email List, Build One for Free Instead

What Does It Mean to “Buy Email List”?

An email list includes a list of names, email addresses, and perhaps other demographic data like company name or income level. You can buy these lists from email database providers like ZoomInfo and Apollo.

Smaller marketing agencies that scrap email data from platforms like LinkedIn also sell email marketing lists online.

Since email marketing is the #1 way to sell anything online, many amateur business owners buy a list of emails to run their email marketing campaigns.

If you set to create an organic email list with thousands of customer data on your own, it would take several months. But when you buy an email list online, you get instant access to hundreds or thousands of customer data.

But is buying email lists worth it?

Short answer: no.

Buying an email list is a really bad idea and a huge waste of money. It’s one of those hacks that simply doesn’t work and will likely cause your business far more harm than good.

Why You Should Never Buy Email List

Here are 8 reasons why you should never purchase an email list.

1. You Can’t Trust the Quality of the List
2. You Might Have to Pay Hefty Fines
3. You’ll Come Across as a Spammer
4. Email Marketing Platforms Can Ban You
5. You’ll Risk Your Brand Reputation
6. Other Brands Might Use the Exact Same List
7. Your Response Rate Will Suffer a Lot
8. No Reputable Expert Recommends It

1. You Can’t Trust the Quality of the List

Buying an email list is not like building a quality email list from the ground up. You get a ton of junk leads when you buy a second-hand email list. Purchasing email lists also poses several other problems, such as:

• Missing or incomplete data: There’s a high chance that the email list has wrong names and email addresses.
• Out-of-date information: Depending on how old the email marketing list is, it might include email addresses that no longer exist or are abandoned.
• Illegally sourced email addresses: Many email list sellers scrap social media platforms like LinkedIn to curate the email addresses of people without their consent. Using these email addresses for your marketing campaigns is against the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003).

Businesses that buy contact lists might think getting 5,000–10,000 email addresses overnight is like hitting a jackpot. But an email address list is pretty worthless if it has outdated, incorrect, and unlawful lead data.

2. You Might Have to Pay Hefty Fines

Buying email lists isn’t illegal. But how you use the email data can land you in costly legal battles.

Most countries have stringent laws against sending unsolicited bulk emails, such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the USA.

If the email list you buy violates the CAN-SPAM Act, you can pay a fine of up to $50,120 for each separate email you send:

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a similar data protection law in the European Union (EU) that has specific clauses against spam. GDPR states that you need people’s consent to contact them through email.

But when you buy an email list from 3rd-party vendors, you don’t have the explicit consent of people included in that list. That’s a violation of GDPR’s data privacy rule. As a result, you might have to pay up to 10 million euros or 2% of your entire global revenue, whichever is higher.

Facebook’s parent company Meta forked up $1.3 billion in early 2023 after it violated the GDPR rule against processing people’s personal data from the EU to the USA.

Canada has Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) that has similar prohibitions to encourage permission-based email marketing.

Different countries have different laws around spam. If the email list you buy includes people from a country that has anti-spam laws, you’ll have to abide by those laws.

3. You’ll Come Across as a Spammer

Your emails might be well-written and valuable. It might have the best subject lines and call-to-action (CTA) buttons optimized for conversions.

But email outreach works best when people receiving your emails can recall your brand. That’s rarely the case with purchased email lists.

For recipients who don’t know your brand, you’re just an unknown company spamming their inbox. Customers either delete or unsubscribe to emails from brands they don’t know. Many will mark unsolicited emails as spam to stop getting those emails in the future (more on this in the next heading).

Research says that marketing messages are the most common type of spam, which makes up 36% of all spam emails. In 2022 alone, we saw over 162 billion spam emails sent daily!

Too many people reporting your marketing emails can hurt your email deliverability and IP reputation. Email verification and spam blocklist databases like Spamhaus and Spamcop can flag your IP address and blacklist your domain.

Pro-tip Do you want to learn how to improve your email’s reach? Follow the email deliverability best practices.

4. Email Marketing Platforms Can Ban You

When people start mass reporting your emails as spam, you get on the wrong side of your email marketing platforms.

These are marketing automation platforms such as AWeber, ConvertKit, or Constant Contact that integrate with your CRM and let you manage your email marketing campaigns.

Most email marketing platforms have strict policies that forbid users from buying business email marketing lists. They can close your account, impose a fine on your brand, or start legal action against you if you violate the rules.

Here’s an example.

Aweber considers buying email lists as spamming, and it is a serious violation of their service agreement. It has explicit warnings against the use of spam on its website.

Email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Yahoo! also discourage businesses from sending emails without people’s consent. The ESPs might mark your email messages as spam or suspend your business account without prior notice.

5. You’ll Risk Your Brand Reputation

Besides email marketing platforms banning you, buying an email list is also a serious risk to your brand reputation.

A lot of customers take to social media to rant about brands that send too many spam emails. Even worse, your brand name can become synonymous with spam and can get ranked in the list of companies that send the most spam.

Creating a respectable brand is crucial, and you don’t want to spend huge amounts of money on damage control later.

6. Other Brands Might Use the Exact Same List

To maximize their profits, email list providers sell the same set of email contacts to multiple buyers. It’s one of the reasons why they sell business email lists at a discount.

Using duplicate lists affects your conversion rates and other marketing metrics in the long term. Imagine 5–10 brands bombarding marketing emails to the same set of people. It gets annoying and creates a bad customer experience.

These recipients are unlikely to buy from you or interact with you, no matter how appealing your offer is. Many of them might even put spam filters in place to never see your emails in the future.

7. Your Response Rate Will Suffer a Lot

Let’s say you have an eCommerce store that sells a product for $20 per unit. You buy an email list of 10,000 names. You figure that on a 5% conversion rate, you’ll sell 500 units of your new product, which gets you $10,000.

Not bad, right?

Well, your response rate will likely be far lower than 5%. In reality, most people on purchased lists don’t even open your email, let alone click on the call-to-action buttons in your email.

Purchased email lists have far lower open and click-through rates. Statistically speaking, only 1 out of 12,500,000 emails convert successfully. That’s because 74% of buyers hate receiving irrelevant emails.

Contrast that with the average email open rates of 20–25% for healthy, targeted email lists.

Pro-tip Are you looking for ways to improve your eCommerce conversion rate? Read our guide on the ultimate eCommerce optimization tips.

8. No Reputable Expert Recommends It

On most marketing topics, people have differences of opinion about which strategies work and which don’t. But everyone agrees that buying an email list is not worth it.

Read any major blog on email marketing, and you’ll get the same validation from all of them: Don’t purchase email lists.

Here’s what experts have to say on the topic of purchased email lists:

“Purchased lists are ticking time bombs, waiting to devastate your reputation as a sender. Riddled with dead emails and spam traps, they quickly inform mailbox providers that you break the rules by sending unsolicited emails. If you still buy email lists, STOP NOW.”

– Neil Patel, YouTube Content Creator and Co-Founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, and Hello Bar

“It’s tempting because you want to do it fast. But you don’t want to be in the business of spamming people. Unsolicited emails are not how you want to get out there. You want to build relationships.”

– Evan Carmichael, Author and YouTube Content Creator

“There is too much to lose when you use this method to obtain leads for your small business. If you want to maintain a relevant customer base, follow the law, and keep your reputation, work on building your own email list from scratch.”

– Syed Balkhi, Founder of WPBeginner, WPForms, and OptinMonster

To summarize, buying emails is a waste of money and marketing efforts that can affect your brand awareness negatively.

Don’t Buy Email List, Build One for Free Instead

The best alternative to buying email lists is building targeted email lists from scratch. Building an audience should be a priority in your digital marketing strategy, and list-building is the best way to achieve it.

Targeted list building helps you create a strong inbound marketing strategy instead of relying too much on outbound channels like cold emails, cold calling, and paid advertising.

In the long run, an inbound marketing strategy like driving website traffic through blogs is more scalable and cost-effective because it’s organic.

But if you’re just starting, you might not be sure where to begin. Here’s an easy step-by-step guide to building your email list organically.

Step 1: Build an Audience With Engaging Content

Every brand has something of value that they can offer to their target market. Use your expertise to trade good content for customers’ contact information, like email addresses and phone numbers.

If you don’t have a website yet, start there. Publish high-quality content like blogs, videos, tutorials, or infographics to drive relevant traffic to your website.

Next, create an optin campaign to let people join your email list.

When you create engaging content that’s relevant to your target audience, they are more than willing to subscribe to your email newsletters or blogs.

This builds trust, and you can easily sell your products or services to your subscribers without much friction.

Step 2: Create a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is an incentive you offer potential subscribers in exchange for their email addresses.

This is slightly different than asking people to join your list. With lead magnets, the trade-off is very straightforward. You can create a landing page, publish valuable content, and let people access it in exchange for their email addresses.

Depending on your niche and what your audience prefers, the lead magnets can be:

• Industry reports
• How-to guides
• Webinar
• Ebooks or whitepapers
• Templates
• Quizzes, surveys, or polls
• Giveaway contests
• Online courses
• Free product trials
• Free consultations
• ROI calculators

Here’s an example of a lead magnet on our blog:

Pro-tip Want to learn how to use lead magnets to boost your lead generation? Here are a ton of examples to help you grow your email list.

Step 3: Work With a Reputable Email Marketing Platform

Don’t try to cut corners by sending out bulk emails through your email client like Outlook or Gmail. Your internet service provider (ISP) will block or penalize you for this, and you’ll miss out on many crucial features that email service providers offer.

Instead, create an account with a reputable email marketing platform. We recommend Constant Contact. But you can pick anyone from this list of the best email service providers.

Step 4: Add Optin Forms to Your Website

Don’t make the mistake of creating just 1 type of optin form and placing it in your website’s sidebar. You have to optimize your website and experiment with a variety of optin campaigns for maximum conversions.

The good news is, creating and embedding optin email forms is dead simple with a tool like OptinMonster. You can choose from over 100 ready-to-use templates to fit your use cases.

OptinMonster’s drag and drop interface allows you to easily create and customize signup forms. With OptinMonster, you can build multiple types of optin forms like:

• Lightbox popups
• Exit-intent popups
• Slide-in scroll boxes
• Floating bars
• Inline forms
• Fullscreen welcome mats
• 2-step optins

We don’t recommend overwhelming your website visitors with too many popups. It creates a bad user experience and increases your website bounce rate.

Instead, have a good mix of 1-2 optin campaigns on a few pages that drive the highest traffic. Run A/B tests to measure which campaigns and variations convert the best.

Once you have data, double down on the campaigns that convert well and pause the ones with poor results.

Err on the Side of Caution: Don’t Purchase Email Lists

Can you buy email addresses? Legally speaking, nothing stops you from scraping email addresses or buying them from others. But is buying email lists worth it? Certainly not.

There are plenty of reasons why you should never purchase an email list, but not even 1 good reason why it’s useful.

Bottom line: Never buy an email list. It’s simply not worth your time and money.

Instead, spend your marketing efforts on building a targeted email list of customers who are eager to buy from you. Here are some more resources to help you get started:

• Email Marketing: How to Build an Email List
• How to Create an Email Campaign
• Email Segmentation Strategies You Need To Know
• Email Signup Forms: 12 Places to Add Them for Higher Conversions

And if you want to grow your email list, get started with OptinMonster. It’s the #1 lead generation software that helps you convert website visitors into subscribers and customers.

PodBike used OptinMonster to build an organic email list and improved its conversion rate by 18.22% with just one campaign!

Email newsletters are a vital part of your business’s growth. They give you direct access to your target audience and allow you to keep in touch with all of your leads.

At OptinMonster, we have poured a lot of hard work into building an email list of over 235,000 people who subscribe to our email newsletter:

Thanks to the newsletter, we have been able to build strong customer relationships, cut down our marketing costs, and drive measurable results.

If you are considering starting an email newsletter, you don’t really have to spend hours every week setting them up. Most email service providers (ESP) allow you to automate these campaigns.

That means you can grow your contact list and send personalized emails that generate more revenue while you’re sleeping.

That’s why, in today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create an email newsletter in just 7 easy steps.

Here’s everything I’ll cover in this blog:

• Why You Need an Email Newsletter
• How to Create an Email Newsletter
  • Step 1: Choose the Right Email Service Provider
  • Step 2: Choose an Email Newsletter Template
  • Step 3: Create an Email List
  • Step 4: Be Aware of the Legal Compliances
  • Step 5: Write Your Email Newsletter Content
  • Step 6: Send Your First Email Newsletter
  • Step 7: Build an Email List

Before we get into the weeds of how to start a newsletter, let’s first discuss why you need one.

Why Do You Need an Email Newsletter?

An email newsletter is a type of email that shares content such as product news, announcements, blog posts, tips, and other resources that are valuable for the subscribers.

The newsletter subscribers are usually existing customers or leads who have opted in for the email. They have expressed interest in receiving marketing communications from a company or individual.

But more than anything else, you need to know why email newsletters are so important for growing your business.

Email newsletters have many advantages. They allow you to:

• Build long-term relationships: Newsletters help you stay connected with your core audience and build stronger relationships. You can share valuable content, industry insights, and exclusive offers to keep your subscribers engaged.
• Run cost-effective campaigns: Compared to other marketing channels like paid ads, email newsletters are extremely cost-effective. For example, you can use the same newsletter template to send thousands of emails.
• Communicate directly with your audience: Newsletters go straight to your subscribers’ inboxes, putting your message right in front of an audience group that is interested in buying from you.
• Sharpen your targeted reach: You can segment your email list and send targeted and personalized content to different groups of subscribers based on their interests or demographics. This increases the relevance of your message and improves engagement.
• Increase brand awareness: Every time a subscriber shares the content of your newsletter in their network, it triggers word-of-mouth marketing for your brand. This helps you boost your brand awareness and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
• Drive website traffic: Newsletters are a great way to drive traffic to your website. You can include links to your latest blog posts, product pages, or landing pages in your newsletter.
• Boost sales: Newsletters can be used to promote your products or services, offer discounts, and drive sales, especially during the holiday sales season such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Drive measurable results: With email marketing tools, you can track the open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics of your newsletter campaigns. This data helps you understand what’s working and what’s not, so you can improve your future newsletters.

At the end of the day, email newsletters will help you get what you’re really after: higher conversions.

Woodside Community, a South Carolina-based private living community, used OptinMonster to grow its newsletter subscription. Within 2 months of starting the campaign, they generated over $294,435 in revenue!

Read more about it in our case study: How Woodside Communities Made $294,435 in 2 months with OptinMonster.

That’s the power of a well-crafted email newsletter strategy. Woodside did it all with this basic popup campaign:

Now that you understand what a newsletter is and why it’s so important, let’s learn how to make an email newsletter.

How to Create an Email Newsletter

In this section, I’ll take you through the step-by-step tutorial on how to create an email newsletter.

You can jump to whichever section interests you most:

• Step 1: Choose the Right Email Service Provider
• Step 2: Choose an Email Newsletter Template
• Step 3: Create an Email List
• Step 4: Be Aware of the Legal Compliances
• Step 5: Write Your Email Newsletter Content
• Step 6: Send Your First Email Newsletter
• Step 7: Build an Email List

We’ll start by selecting the right ESP. That way, you can get started on the right foot and build an automated process that lasts you for years to come.

Step 1: Choose the Right Email Service Provider

The first thing you need to do is determine which ESP you’ll work with.

Look for a tool that allows you to scale so you don’t need to change platforms as your requirements grow.

Here are some must-have features that you should prioritize when you are shortlisting an ESP:

• List Management: Make sure the ESP lets you easily manage your contact list, segment lists, rearrange groups, and send and track customized messages. Good list management is the foundation for successful email automation. It helps you reach the right audience, with the right content, and at the right time.
• Easy-to-Use Editor: Choose an ESP that’s user-friendly and readily integrates with your lead generation tools. You don’t want to spend hours wrestling with complex software that requires you to manually connect with other tools in your tech stack.
• Email Automation: A good ESP will allow you to set up automated email sequences to welcome new subscribers, recover abandoned carts, or other marketing campaigns.
• In-Depth Reporting: Choose a tool that lets you use a data-driven approach to email marketing. Having access to your campaign performance can help you refine your campaign strategy for better impact.
• Compliance: Most commercial email marketing software will already be compliant with email laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR. But it’s best to check the laws specific to your country.

If you already are using an ESP that checks all the boxes, that’s great!

You can click here to skip directly to Step #2.

At OptinMonster, we have used a wide variety of ESPs along different stages of our company’s growth. If you want advice on the best ESPs, here are some of our favorites that you can consider:

1. Constant Contact

Constant Contact offers an easy-to-use, lightweight interface and is great for both big and small businesses. As one of the largest email marketing services in the world, Constant Contact offers great deliverability rates and highly-rated support with every plan.

You can use their drag-and-drop editor and ready-to-use email newsletter templates to create and send professional emails.

These newsletter template emails are designed to work with a wide range of email clients and apps such as Outlook, Gmail, or Apple Mail. You can even send automated emails to new subscribers.

Plus, the emails are responsive, so they look great on mobile devices and desktops.

Constant Contact is one of our favorites because it’s the most beginner-friendly and the easiest to use, but it doesn’t skimp on the features.

With Constant Contact, you get an email marketing platform that’s easy to use and includes powerful marketing tools like a free image library, Facebook ads integration, eCommerce integration for Shopify stores, built-in social media sharing tools, and list segmentation.

Get started with Constant Contact today!

2. HubSpot

HubSpot Email Marketing offers some of the most powerful analytics along with an intuitive and easy-to-use interface for non-tech users.

Start by creating beautiful, on-brand emails with the drag-and-drop editor. You can customize your emails by adding call-to-action (CTA) buttons, colors, images, social icons, and text while ensuring they are responsive on all devices.

You can also segment your email lists to target specific viewers, like returning customers or new customers. Or, you can schedule emails to optimize your open and click-through rate.

With OptinMonster, you get access to detailed analytics on how your campaigns perform and the option to carry out A/B testing to optimize your newsletters further.

Get started with HubSpot today!

3. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a powerful email marketing tool with minimal startup costs that gives free users an unlimited number of contacts.

It comes with great features like automation workflows, autoresponder campaigns, segmentation tools, and A/B testing.

Brevo also includes in-depth reporting and real-time stats, so you know how your campaigns are doing.

You can create email newsletters that are stunning and optimized to look great on every device.

Get started with Brevo today!

4. Drip

Drip is another excellent email service provider that you can choose from.

You can keep your contact list stored with Drip and create email campaigns. When new users sign up, you can tag, segment, or add the new user groups to an automated email series.

Over time, you can refine your email marketing strategy and put everything on autopilot. As new leads come in, they’ll get new emails that nurture the relationship until they become customers.

DripGet started with Drip today!

Alternatives: Mailchimp, MailerLite, ConvertKit

Once you have selected your email service provider, you are ready to create your first newsletter. To do that, let’s set up your email list.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using Constant Contact.

Step 2: Choose the Right Email Newsletter Template

All of the ESPs that I have recommended earlier come with plenty of email newsletter templates for you to build your email campaigns. You should choose a template based on your audience’s preferences, your brand style, and your newsletter’s theme.

Consider the following tips when you are choosing an email newsletter template:

Consider Your Audience and Goals

Be clear about what your audience prefers. For instance, a template for a tech company might not resonate with a yoga studio’s audience. No matter which template you choose, tailor its design to align it with your audience’s interests.

Also, think about what you expect out of your audience. What is it that you want them to do? Will you be offering tips to grow your customers’ businesses, sharing industry news, or offering occasional discounts?

The template should guide them toward that action.

Focus on Functionality and Design

Research shows that over 60% of email opens are from mobile devices.

That means your email newsletter templates should be mobile-friendly and compatible with Android, iOS, and other mobile operating systems.

Also, make sure that the template is eye-catching and scannable. Most people skim through emails. Use clear sections, fonts, headings, and bullet points to break up text.

Think About Content and CTAs

Any template you choose should allow you to add or delete text, images, videos, and CTA buttons as per your requirements.

Yes, you should prioritize keeping your newsletter design as simple as possible. But the email newsletter templates you choose should also be flexible to adapt to your changing needs.

Finally, test and iterate. You can send test emails to yourself or your colleagues to see how the template renders on different devices. And then you can make tweaks based on what works best.

Step 3: Create an Email List

In this step, I’ll show you how you can send your first email newsletter using Constant Contact. If you don’t already have an account, you’ll need to sign up.

An email list is just what it sounds like: a directory of all the subscribers who sign up to receive your email newsletter.

When people enter their email addresses into an email subscription form, their names are added to your email list. So let’s make sure those names have somewhere to go!

First, log into Constant Contact.

Click on Contacts in the top menu and make sure you’re on the Lists tab. Click the Create List button on the far right:

Next, enter a name for your list in the popup that appears.

Subscribers won’t see this name, but make sure it’s something you can easily recognize, such as, ‘Holiday Promotions List’ or ‘Lead Magnet Subscribers.’

Click Save once you are done.

You’ll need to add at least one contact to start using this email list. You can add your own email address to test that your newsletters are sending properly.

To add email addresses, click on the Add Contacts button on the top-right of the screen:

Choose how you want to add your contacts. I’ll go with the Create a new contact option:

Enter your email address and click Continue:

On the next screen, add any other contact details you need. I recommend putting at least a first and last name. Make sure to double-check the email list you just created:

And that’s it! You just created your 1st email list in Constant Contact.

Next, let’s go over how to craft the perfect email content to pull your subscribers in and get them to convert.

Step 4: Be Aware of the Legal Compliances

If you breach data privacy laws in regions where your business operates, it might lead to hefty fines, damaged reputation, and even lawsuits.

Eyewear retailer Luxottica owns global brands like Oakley and Sunglass Hut. In April 2024, the company had to pay a $1,512,500 fine for sending more than 200,000 marketing messages in violation of Australian spam laws.

There are a few key legal compliances to consider before hitting send on your email newsletter. These will primarily focus on subscriber consent, transparency, and giving users control over their information.

Here’s a quick breakdown of such compliances:

1. Ask for consent: Make sure you have explicit optin consent from recipients to receive your emails. Avoid pre-checked boxes or bundling signups with other services.
2. Maintain full transparency: Accurately identify your business. This is to ensure that the sender’s information is explicitly clear. Also, clearly label the email newsletter as a marketing communication for full disclosure. Finally, Include your valid physical postal address in the email content to comply with industry rules.
3. Offer easy unsubscribe Options: Make it easy for people to unsubscribe or change their email preferences. Yes, it’s not easy to see your subscribers go. But it’s better to make that process easy than to have annoyed subscribers reporting you for spam.

These are general guidelines, but specific regulations may vary depending on your location. Here are some prominent ones to consider:

• CAN-SPAM (US): The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act sets compliance standards for commercial emails in the United States.
• CASL (Canada): Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation outlines similar rules for email marketing with a focus on transparency and opt-out options.
• GDPR (EU): The General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union sets stricter data protection standards, including obtaining explicit consent for data use.

If you want more information on how to make your newsletter legally compliant, I strongly recommend you consult with a legal professional. They are familiar with email marketing regulations in your region.

Step 5: Write Your Email Newsletter Content

Content is the most important part of an email newsletter. Even if you have a beautiful email newsletter template, your subscribers will unsubscribe if you send them boring, irrelevant, or overly promotional content.

Here are some pointers on how to craft the perfect content for your email newsletter:

• Identify the main purpose of your newsletter as well as your overall email marketing strategy. Are you trying to get new clients? Share affiliate links? Sell new products? What you write will depend on what your purpose is.
• Get to the point clearly and quickly. From the email subject line to the headers in the email content, every sentence should have a purpose. Each of them should deliver value to your audience, tell them what to expect, or call them to take action.
• Help the readers meet their goals. Readers don’t subscribe because they want to help you meet your goals. They want your help meeting their goals. In an ideal world, you can meet your own goals by helping them meet theirs. Create informational content that helps people solve their problems while encouraging them to take the action you want.
• Pick 1 main CTA. What do you want readers to do after they read your newsletter? Maybe you want them to click a link to a sales page or your social media accounts. Or maybe you want them to write a response back to you. Don’t be shy about asking them to take this step!

Here are some of the best email newsletter examples you can look at for inspiration. Once you have your newsletter content written, you can send your newsletter.

Step 6: Send Your First Email Newsletter

To send your newsletter, you’ll once again need to go back to Constant Contact since that’s where you have stored your campaign details and email addresses.

Log into Constant Contact. Then click on the Marketing tab and select Create an email from the dropdown:

With this, you’ll now have the option to choose from several ready-to-use newsletter template emails:

You can search for the right kind of templates and hover over the one you like and click Select:

Once you’re in the email builder, editing your newsletter is simple.

You can change the text directly in the campaign. Or you can add new features to your email using the Block elements on the left-hand side menu:

Then you can simply drag and drop them into place.

The best part? There’s zero coding, zero tech skills, and zero headaches involved.

Once you’re done designing the template to your liking, click on the Continue button on the top-right:

From there, you’ll just need to configure other details about your campaign, such as:

• Subject line
• Audience
• Sender info

Check it over for typos and that your email design looks the way you want it. Now your email newsletter will be ready to send!

If you need help writing more persuasive email copy, don’t worry.

I have got you covered.

Check out our 17 tips on how to write email copy that converts.

Once your newsletter is sent, you can see updated metrics such as open rates, click rates, and unsubscribes. Use this data to improve your newsletter strategy.

Did you get a great conversion rate on a specific piece of content? Send another newsletter next time with a similar topic or format.

You can also experiment with sending email subscribers to different landing pages and see how your conversion rates change as a result.

Finally, let’s go over how you can get more subscribers for your newsletter.

Related Content: 5 Best WordPress Newsletter Plugins for More Engagement

Step 7: Build an Email List Using OptinMonster

Most successful email marketing campaigns start with a list full of qualified leads interested in what you have to offer.

After all, even the best email copy on the planet won’t convert if it doesn’t get seen.

So what you, as an online marketer, are supposed to do exactly to taste success with your email campaigns repeatedly?

That’s where OptinMonster comes into play:

OptinMonster is the world’s #1 lead generation software. That means we’re the best at growing your email list through highly-targeted optin campaigns, like:

• Lightbox Popups
• Floating Bars
• Inline Campaigns
• Fullscreen Welcome Mats

And many more.

These campaigns help you grow your email list fast. Here’s an example of what a simple lightbox popup might look like:

OptinMonster also comes with over 100 pre-made templates that help save you time and energy in the campaign creation process:

You can modify these campaign templates with an easy drag-and-drop visual builder.

This allows you to modify any text in your optin campaign or add new elements, such as:

• Videos
• Images
• Dividers
• Icons
• HTML
• And much more

And, again, everything can be done with just a few clicks:

But creating the campaign is only half the battle.

From there, you’ll need to target your special offers to the right people, in the right places, and at just the right times in their customer journey.

Some of OptinMonster’s most powerful targeting rules include:

• Exit-Intent® Technology: Recover abandoning visitors when they are about to leave your website.
• OnSite Retargeting®: Keep users engaged by displaying fresh campaigns to returning visitors.
• Geolocation Targeting: Personalize UX by targeting visitors by their physical locations.
• MonsterLinks: Boost conversions by turning any link into a clickable email newsletter signup form.

These rules have gotten massive results for our clients. Just look at these case studies from OptinMonster customers:

• Human Food Bar Added 1800+ Leads Each Month
• SnackNation Adds 1200 Segmented Leads Every Week
• Shotkit Gets 40+ NEW Leads Every Single Day

But here’s the best part: OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with any email service provider on the market:

That means you can quickly sync your ESP and have new leads sent directly to the right contact list.

Then you can have your newsletters automatically sent to your new leads to convert them into happy (and paying) customers.

Ready to get started? Click below to sign up for your risk-free OptinMonster account today:

Grow Your Email List Today

BONUS: Done-For-You Campaign Setup ($297 value)Our conversion experts will design 1 free campaign for you to get maximum results – absolutely FREE! Click here to get started →

Ready to Send Your First Newsletter?

An email newsletter is a powerful tool to nurture relationships with your audience. It keeps you on their mind, drives traffic to your website, and can even boost sales. And don’t forget, it’s one of the most cost-effective marketing channels to engage with your customers.

If you found this guide on how to make an email newsletter helpful, you might also like the following posts:

• How to Write Email Copy That Converts
• 13 Simple eCommerce Marketing Tips to Skyrocket Your Sales
• Email Marketing for Beginners: A Step-by-Step Guide
• 8 Product Recommendation Email Examples to Drive Sales
• Webinars for Lead Generation: Tips and Strategies for Success
• What Is SEO? Find Out How Search Engine Optimization Really Works
• 45 Best Digital Marketing Tools to Boost Your Business

Ready to grow your newsletter subscription?

Get started with OptinMonster today!

In my 15 years of sending promotional emails, I’ve seen just how important it is to clean your list regularly. And here at OptinMonster, email scrubbing is essential to maintaining our list of over 235,000 subscribers.

In this article, I’ll discuss the importance of email list cleaning, also known as email scrubbing. I’ll explain how to clean email lists with a few basic steps and show you how to keep your list clean by verifying new leads.

• What Is Email Scrubbing?
• Importance of Keeping a Clean Email List
• How to Clean Email Lists (6 Steps)
• Alternative: Use an Email List Cleaning Service
• Keep Your List Clean With Verified Email Signups

What Is Email Scrubbing?

Email scrubbing is the process of removing unengaged subscribers and invalid addresses from your email list. With a clean email list, you can optimize your email marketing to be more efficient and more successful.

Here are the types of contacts that you want to target when cleaning an email list:

• Invalid email addresses: These often occur due to typos or because an account or domain has expired.
• Disposable email addresses: Some users will create a temporary email address to register to your site or sign up for a lead magnet.
• Duplicate contacts: This is when there are multiple instances of the same email address on your list.
• Inactive subscribers: You should regularly remove contacts who haven’t opened any of your emails and don’t respond to a re-engagement campaign.

This cleaning/scrubbing process is a vital part of email list hygiene. When you regularly scrub your email list, you eliminate subscribers who will never actually see your emails anyway.

Importance of Keeping a Clean Email List

It may feel like a bummer to delete email subscribers that you worked hard to get. But if those addresses aren’t leading to engagement, then your subscriber number is just a vanity metric. On the other hand, the benefits of email list cleaning are very real, which is why I recommend scrubbing your email list at least twice a year.

Here are some of the top benefits of cleaning your email list:

Better (& More Accurate) Engagement Metrics

As an email marketer, you spend a lot of time and energy measuring the success of your email campaigns. However, if you’ve never cleaned your list, then your metrics won’t be very accurate.

The good news? Your metrics are probably actually higher than you think!

Email open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and other conversion rates are calculated as a percentage of the total number of emails sent.

If invalid and inactive subscribers make up 20% of your list, then these metrics will be artificially low.

Cleaning your email list means you’re sending emails only to those who are interested. And who are real people! This improves your open and CTR percentages.

By cleaning our own email list here at OptinMonster, we’ve achieved phenomenal open rates for our campaigns.

When you remove contacts that never open your emails, you’ll see your metrics improve, too.

Fewer Spam Complaints

Cleaning your email list also reduces your number of spam complaints. Some subscribers mark your emails as spam because they don’t remember signing up, even if they actually did.

Email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, and others log spam complaints. If there are too many, they’ll start sending your emails straight to the spam folder, skipping the inbox. And they’ll do that for everyone on your list, not just the people who reported you.

Regular email scrubbing helps you identify those uninterested contacts before they resort to marking your messages as spam.

Decrease in Bounced Emails

Sometimes, emails bounce, which means they never reach the intended recipient. Bounces can be caused by full inboxes, changed email addresses, or a technical error.

There are 2 basic types of email bounces:

• Hard bounces: These are permanent delivery failures, such as an invalid address. These addresses can be immediately scrubbed.
• Soft bounces: These are temporary problems, such as a downed server or a full inbox. These addresses may still be valid.

Too many bounces have a similar effect as spam complaints: they signal to ESPs that you may be a spammer.

If you remove bounced email addresses when you clean your email list, the number and percentage of bounces will go down the next time you send.

Through email scrubbing, we’re able to keep our bounce rate under 1% here at OptinMonster.

Improved Sender Reputation & Email Deliverability

Email list cleaning helps you improve all of the above metrics. The sum result of all that improvement? A better sender reputation and improved email deliverability.

Your sender reputation is how trustworthy email servers think you are. And your email deliverability is the percentage of your emails that make it into recipients’ inboxes. A good sender reputation makes it much more likely that your messages will be accepted by email servers and get through their spam filters.

In other words, when you keep a clean list, more of your subscribers will actually see your emails.

Reduced Cost

Email marketing services often charge according to the number of emails you send, the number of subscribers you have, or both.

That means there’s a real financial incentive to clean up your email list. Every invalid or unengaged subscriber who stays on your list costs you money.

Remove them using email scrubbing, and your email marketing’s return on investment (ROI) will improve.

How to Clean Email Lists (6 Steps)

Next, I’m going to share the most important steps in the email list cleaning process. Most of these steps only take a few minutes to accomplish, with the exception of sending re-engagement emails to inactive contacts.

The exact way to accomplish these steps will vary depending on your email marketing platform. For this tutorial, I’ll show you how to clean a list in Constant Contact. The steps for most software will be similar.

1. Remove Hard Bounces and Invalid Addresses
2. Monitor and Clean Up Soft Bounces
3. Eliminate Duplicate Entries
4. Identify Inactive Subscribers Through Email Segmentation
5. Send a Re-Engagement Campaign (and Remove Those Who Don’t Engage)
6. Set Up a Regular Email Scrubbing Schedule

1. Remove Hard Bounces and Invalid Addresses

First things first: You should delete or correct any email addresses that have hard bounced, as those are permanent failures. In your email marketing platform, you should be able to view the bounced emails for every email campaign you send.

In the Constant Contact dashboard, you first click Reporting:

Scroll down until you see your list of email campaigns. Find the most recent campaign that you sent to the list you want to clean.

Click on the number under the Bounces column. (Note that it’s 0 here because this was a test email I sent. Yours should have a number.)

Click on the All Types dropdown menu. Above the faint gray line, you’ll see the categories of hard bounces. Constant Contact even provides a Recommended for removal type, which contains emails that the platform believe are permanently invalid.

Scan through these hard bounce email addresses to identify any obvious typos. For instance, if an email includes “gnail.com” instead of “gmail.com,” you can correct that typo.

For the rest of the addresses, you can remove them from your email list.

2. Monitor and Clean Up Soft Bounces

Go back to the All Types dropdown menu. The categories below the gray line are soft bounces.

Remember, these soft bounces may only be temporary, so you should not just automatically delete them. However, if these bounces start to build up, you should start monitoring them. If an address consistently soft-bounces for 1-3 months, depending on your email frequency, then you should remove it from your list.

3. Eliminate Duplicate Entries

This step is one that you likely won’t need to take. Most email marketing services, including Constant Contact, prevent duplicate email addresses from being entered. However, if you notice that some duplicates have gotten through, you’ll want to delete those duplicates.

Why? Because they’re adding to your subscriber count, and because you run the risk of annoying subscribers if they receive the same email multiple times.

In Constant Contact, you’ll need to export your email list into a spreadsheet, sort it by email name, and search for duplicates in the spreadsheet. Then, in the Constact Contact dashboard, you can search your contacts for those duplicated emails and delete them.

Since you probably won’t need to complete this step, I won’t go into exact instructions here, but you’ll be able to find instructions in your email software’s documentation. Here’s Constant Contact’s guide for deleting duplicates.

4. Identify Inactive Subscribers Through Email Segmentation

If you’ve gone through the first 3 steps, your list should now only have valid email addresses. But your email scrubbing process isn’t over yet.

Next, you need to clean your email list of subscribers who aren’t opening any of your emails. First, you need identify your inactive subscribers by creating an email segment.

Note: In Constant Contact, you’ll need the Standard or Pro plan in order to complete these steps.

In your Constant Contact dashboard, click Contacts and then Segments.

You’ll notice that Constant Contact has pre-built segments for “Most engaged,” “Somewhat engaged,” and “Least engaged” subscribers. These pre-built segments are extremely handy for precisely targeting your email marketing.

However, for email list cleaning, we’ll want to click Create Segment.

Here, you’ll need to type in a Segment Name. I chose “Inactive Subscribers,” but you should make yours more precise by including the date and the length of inactivity you’re targeting.

Under Add a block, open the Choose a criteria block dropdown and select Contact Activity.

Next, select Did not open in the dropdown menu.

More dropdown menus will appear as you make your selections. Choose any email and in the last. In the last dropdown, you’ll select how long it’s been since the subscriber has opened one of your emails. I suggest choosing either 180 days or 1 year.

Feel free to add any other criteria blocks to your segment. For instance, you could only include members from specific email lists. Constant Contact integrates with Shopify, so you can also add an eCommerce block to only include subscribers who haven’t purchased in the past year.

Once you’ve completed your criteria, Save your segment.

You could go ahead and delete these contacts now. However, I strongly suggest that you try to re-engage them first.

5. Send a Re-Engagement Campaign (and Remove Those Who Don’t Engage)

Before removing inactive subscribers, try to re-engage them with a targeted campaign. Send at least 1 personalized email asking if they still want to receive your content.

Here’s an example of a re-engagement email from Canva.

This message was the final email in a re-engagement series, where contacts were unsubscribed unless they clicked the link in the email.

I suggest sending out 2-4 emails in your re-engagement campaign.

1. First, send an email pointing out that they haven’t opened an email in a while. Take the opportunity to remind them of what you offer. Your subject line can include phrases like “We miss you,” “Let’s reconnect,” or “Are you still interested.” Include a link to manage their email preferences.
2. Send out an incentive like a coupon code or free content.
3. If you’ve offered an incentive, send a “Last Chance” email.
4. If they haven’t opened any of these emails, send a goodbye email letting them know that you won’t be emailing them anymore. Be sure to include a link to resubscribe.

You can use an email automation flow to schedule this email series, or you can manually send each one. I suggest running your segment again each time, so you’re only sending to subscribers who didn’t open your last email.

Of course, if this sounds like more work than you have time for, just send emails #1 and #4. Simply email your inactive subscribers to ask if they still want to hear from you. If they don’t open that email, send the goodbye message with the link to resubscribe.

Then, you can confidently clean those contacts from your list.

6. Set Up a Regular Email Scrubbing Schedule

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll have a clean email list full of engaged, high-quality subscribers. But just like your kitchen, no email list stays clean forever.

I recommend scrubbing your emails every 6 months. Set calendar reminders and keep these steps handy, so you can come back to them twice a year.

Of course, you should also monitor your email engagement metrics year-round. If you have a significant dip in opens and clicks, you might want to schedule another cleaning.

Alternative: Use an Email List Cleaning Service

As you can see, most of the steps to cleaning an email list are pretty simple. However, there are several email list cleaning services that can do a lot of the work for you. These work well for companies with large email lists, who don’t have the time to manually clean their email lists.

Email scrubbing services include features like:

• Email list validation
• Fixing typos in email addresses
• Bulk email list verification
• Checking for emails from disposable email address providers
• Blocking fake email addresses

Note that these services do not clean inactive subscribers, so you’ll still need to use email segments to scrub those contacts. But these email list cleaning tools can still save you a lot of time.

Email Verification Services

Some email scrubbing services to try include:

• BriteVerify
• Data Validation
• ListWise
• MailBox Validator
• Quick Email Verification

Keep Your Email List Clean With Lead Verification

Once you’ve scrubbed your list, what are the best ways to keep your email list clean?

1. Prevent invalid email addresses from getting on your list in the first place by verifying every new email signup.
2. Attract subscribers who are highly interested in your brand.
3. Consider using double opt-ins to confirm all subscribers. And always send a welcome email.

You can do all of this and more with OptinMonster!

OptinMonster is the best lead-generation software available. You can use our lightbox popups, floating bars, inline forms, and other onsite campaigns to get more subscribers on your email list.

Lead Verification with OptinMonster’s TruLead®

Our TruLead® add-on is a lead verification tool that automatically filters out “bad emails” such as spambots, disposable email addresses, and invalid or undeliverable addresses.

Learn how it works in this video:

With TruLead®, you can stop bad emails in their tracks before they’re ever added to your list.

Use Precise Targeting to Capture High-Quality Leads

You want your email list to be full of subscribers who are excited to hear from you. OptinMonster can help you achieve that goal by showing the right offers to the right people at the right time.

Here are a few of the targeting and triggering rules we offer:

• Page-Level Targeting: Show tailored campaigns based on the content or products the visitor is browsing
• Timed Display Controls: Only show your signup form after the visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your page.
• Onsite Retargeting®: Target returning visitors with special deals or messages.
• Exit-Intent® Technology: Show an enticing offer to capture your visitors’ email addresses before they leave your site.

By precisely targeting your campaigns, you’ll get leads who are primed to open your emails and engage with your brand.

Send Double Opt-ins & Welcome Emails Through OptinMonster Integrations

OptinMonster integrates seamlessly with all major email marketing platforms. You can use your email platform’s settings to send one or both of the following to each person who signs up through your OptinMonster campaigns:

1. A confirmation email the subscriber must click before being added to your list. This is known as a double opt-in. Your list might grow more slowly with double opt-ins, but you’ll have a more engaged list. Learn more about the pros and cons of double opt-ins.
2. A welcome email to each new subscriber, thanking them for signing up and letting them know what to expect. Welcome emails help people remember that they did actually subscribe and ensure there are no surprises. Learn more about writing welcome emails.

These strategies both help prevent subscribers from becoming inactive, so you won’t have as many emails to clean.

With OptinMonster, you can easily maintain your list as you go. While you should still scrub your emails a couple times a year, it will be faster and easier because you have a strong list to start with.

A Clean Email List Is a Successful Email List

With these tips and steps at your disposal, you’re ready to set up an email scrubbing schedule that will keep your email marketing going strong.

Want to learn more ways to optimize your email strategy? Check out these resources:

• How to Create a Winning Email Marketing Strategy
• 14 Common Email Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid
• eCommerce Email Marketing: Email Types, Examples, & Tips
• 40+ Email Marketing Statistics You Need to Know

Are you ready to start turning your website visitors into engaged subscribers and customers? Sign up for OptinMonster today, with our 14-day, 100% money-back guarantee!

Newsletters are a specific subset of email marketing. They’re usually sent at regular intervals, and they focus on delivering interesting content, rather than simply promoting products or services.

But how do you start an email newsletter that will help you reach your nonprofit’s goals?

I worked in nonprofit email marketing for over 15 years. During that time, I built nonprofit newsletters from scratch and revamped existing ones. I used these newsletters to promote the organization’s mission, build goodwill, promote events, and solicit memberships and donations.

In this article, I’ll explain why all nonprofits, even small ones, need an email newsletter. I’ll also share some effective nonprofit newsletter examples, steps for starting a newsletter, and a few tips and best practices.

• Why Your Nonprofit Needs an Email Newsletter
• 4 Nonprofit Newsletter Examples
• How to Start a Nonprofit Newsletter (6 Steps)
• Nonprofit Newsletter Tips & Best Practices

Why Your Nonprofit Needs an Email Newsletter

If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of starting a newsletter for your small nonprofit, I get it. Small organizations are cash-strapped, which means they’re also people-strapped and time-strapped. In any given week while I worked for nonprofits, I might update our website, write a grant, plan and run events, manage multiple social media channels, design a brochure, and send out email campaigns.

That constant multitasking is probably why 73% of nonprofits don’t have a defined email marketing strategy, according to a 2022-2023 report from the Tapp Network and TechSoup.

If your nonprofit is small, you may question whether you’ll get enough return on investment (ROI) for the personnel time that email newsletters require.

So, is a nonprofit newsletter worth the time and effort? The answer is a resounding yes.

In fact, smaller organizations can actually see the biggest impact from email. Here are some impressive numbers from Neon One’s 2023 Nonprofit Email Report:

• The average small nonprofit raises $6.15 per email contact, compared to $0.88 for large organizations.
• Small nonprofits have an average email open rate 45.7%, compared to 27.64% for large nonprofits.
• Small nonprofits see a phenomenal click-through rate (CTR) of 10.24%, compared to an average of 2.91% for large nonprofits.

What does this mean for your nonprofit? Not only can an email newsletter directly help you fundraise, but it can also hugely improve awareness of your mission, as your email recipients open your newsletters, click links to your website, and share the information they learn with their friends and family.

Here are just a few of the goals you can accomplish with a nonprofit newsletter:

• Increase Awareness: Keep supporters informed about your mission, programs, and achievements.
• Engage Donors: Build relationships with donors by sharing success stories and showing the impact of their contributions.
• Further Your Mission: Some newsletters directly target the nonprofit’s beneficiaries and provide resources and information about services.
• Strengthen Community: Foster a sense of belonging and community among supporters and stakeholders.
• Promote Fundraising Efforts: Share info about donation drives and events to generate funds.
• Recruit Volunteers: Attract and retain volunteers by highlighting opportunities and sharing volunteer stories.
• Boost Transparency: Show accountability by sharing financial reports, progress updates, and future plans.
• Drive Website Traffic: Encourage readers to visit your website for more information, resources, and involvement opportunities.

With all of these benefits, your nonprofit should definitely start a newsletter or work on optimizing the one you already have.

4 Nonprofit Newsletter Examples

Before I start exploring specific tips and steps, I want to share a few examples of nonprofit newsletters that I find particularly effective. The first 2 examples are from large international organizations, but the last 2 are from smaller local nonprofits. You’ll see that while the emails from smaller organizations are a bit simpler, they are no less effective in achieving their goals.

1. Welcome Email from Heifer International

I recently signed up for the email newsletter from Heifer International (HI), a nonprofit that seeks to end hunger and poverty worldwide. Within minutes, I received this welcome email:

The subject line “Welcome to the Family!” sets the tone for this new relationship by showing that HI sees their subscribers as important parts of their mission. The email then links to a survey where subscribers can choose which HI programs they want to receive emails about.

Key takeaways: You should always send a welcome email to new subscribers. You can use that email to thank them for their interest in your organization and give them an idea of what they can expect.

If your nonprofit newsletter is new or you have a small email list, you may not be ready to offer multiple content options for subscribers, as HI does here. However, a survey can still help you learn what type of content will interest your readers.

2. Personal Impact Story from Women for Women International

Women for Women International regularly sends out “Sister Spotlight” emails that share how the organization has transformed 1 woman’s life. Here’s an example:

As the subscribers scroll, they get to read more about Grace’s story:

The email goes on to include more photos of Grace, more of her story, and a Donate button.

Key takeaways: Whenever possible, make your nonprofit newsletters personal. Share specific stories about the impact your mission has had on real people. Include photos and the words of the person you’ve helped. Over time, these types of emails will drive donors, advocates, and volunteers to action, as your subscribers see real-life examples of your nonprofit’s work.

3. Monthly Events Email from Florence-Lauderdale Public Library

Next, I’ll share a nonprofit newsletter that I created for the public library I used to work for.

In addition to our full email list, I set up email segments for subscribers who wanted updates on specific departments, such as our children’s department. These segmented subscribers received a monthly newsletter to keep them informed of the coming month’s events.

Here’s an example of an October newsletter that I sent to subscribers of our children’s department emails:

The email features bright colors and photos, matching the style and branding we had established for our children’s department. Below this main header, I included an image that linked to a printable PDF of the October event calendar. I also added a text list of the month’s events, categorized by age range.

Key Takeaways: Our children’s events were consistently well-attended, and this regular, monthly email newsletter contributed to that success. Parents knew that at the end of each month, they would get an email with the next month’s programs. If you want to build a following for your nonprofit newsletter or for your nonprofit itself, consistency is key.

4. Weekly Update Newsletter from tnAchieves

This nonprofit newsletter is from tnAchieves, an organization that offers scholarship support and mentorship for high school seniors and college students in Tennessee. Their email list is mostly the students they serve, their parents, and their teachers, so they send out weekly updates about important opportunities and deadlines.

The footer of the email features a reminder section with important upcoming deadlines, all of which include links for more information:

Key Takeaways: Know your nonprofit newsletter’s audience and tailor your messages to their needs. Here, tnAchieves focuses entirely on what students need to know: opportunities for college financial aid and important upcoming deadlines. They also make themselves easily available for questions and assistance. In fact, the email mentions twice that you can simply reply to the email with any questions.

How to Start a Nonprofit Newsletter (6 Steps)

If you already have a nonprofit newsletter and just want to improve it, feel free skip ahead to the tips & best practices section.

Hopefully, the examples above have inspired some great nonprofit newsletter ideas for your own organization. If you’ve never sent out an email newsletter, don’t worry. Below are the 6 basic steps for learning how to start a newsletter for a nonprofit organization:

Step 1. Choose an Email Marketing Service

In order to manage a subscriber list and send out bulk emails, you’ll need to use an email marketing platform. If you want suggestions, check out our article, 7 Best Nonprofit Email Marketing Software (Compared).

The best platforms will include a drag-and-drop email builder, easy-to-use templates, reports on each email’s performance, and more helpful features.

My top recommendation for beginners is Constant Contact. Their plans start at $12 a month for up to 500 contacts. They also offer a 60-day free trial, so you can make sure it’s the right choice for you.

If you need to start with a free plan, then I suggest you go with Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Their free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails per day. When you outgrow that limit, their paid plans start at $9 a month for up to 5,000 emails per month.

Step 2. Collect Email Addresses

Your nonprofit can’t send out a newsletter if you don’t have an email list. Get your list started by asking for emails from your main stakeholders, such as:

• Existing donors
• Volunteers
• Event attendees
• Partnering organizations and businesses
• People you serve
• Social media followers

Make sure you have permission to add these addresses to your newsletter list. Getting explicit permission is always the best practice, and it’s actually the law in many countries.

Your website is another powerful tool for building your email list, especially if you use OptinMonster.

OptinMonster is the best software available for turning your website visitors into email subscribers. You can use our popups, floating bars, inline forms, and more to encourage visitors to subscribe to your nonprofit’s newsletter.

Our nonprofit customers see huge success by using our software. For instance, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) used OptinMonster to display popups like this one for their Bird of the Week newsletter:

With OptinMonster, ABC doubled their email list and increased their onsite lead generation from under 100 emails per month to over 1500.

Step 3. Decide on Your Nonprofit Newsletter’s Content

Next, you need to decide what information and stories your newsletters should include. Your content will depend on your mission, goals, and audience. It’ll also depend on how much time you have to create your content.

Here are a few examples of the types of content you might include in your nonprofit newsletter:

• Impact Stories: Highlight stories of individuals or communities positively affected by your nonprofit’s work.
• Volunteer Spotlights: Feature dedicated volunteers and their contributions.
• Upcoming Events: Announce fundraising events, workshops, and community activities.
• Program Updates: Share progress and updates on ongoing projects or initiatives.
• Donor Recognition: Acknowledge and thank major donors or sponsors.
• Calls to Action: Encourage readers to donate, volunteer, or participate in events.
• Educational Content: Provide articles or tips related to your nonprofit’s mission.
• Behind-the-Scenes Stories: Offer a glimpse into daily operations or introduce staff members.
• Success Metrics: Share statistics and achievements to demonstrate impact.
• Resources and Tools: Provide useful resources or tools for supporters and the people you serve.

You may choose 1 or 2 of these to include in every newsletter, or you could cycle through different types of content. Start with what you’re comfortable with and have time to do well. You can always adjust your approach down the road.

If you’re unsure of what your stakeholders want to hear about, ask them! Surveys and feedback forms are always a great way to better understand your audience.

Step 4: Determine the Schedule for Your Nonprofit Newsletter

Next, you’ll need to decide how often you’ll email your subscribers. If you’re worried about having enough time for email marketing, I recommend starting with a monthly newsletter.

Set a day of the month that your newsletter will always go out. Then, determine how long it will take you to gather the information and create the newsletter. That way, you can mark your calendar for the day you need to start preparing, and you’ll never miss a newsletter deadline.

Step 5. Find or Create a Template

Here’s some good news: You don’t have to design your nonprofit newsletter from scratch each time. In fact, you don’t have to design it from scratch at all.

All major email marketing platforms offer templates you can use as a jumping-off point. Constant Contact, for instance, offers over 200.

You just need to find the newsletter template that most closely matches the content you want to deliver. Then, customize it with your logo and brand colors.

Once you have a template ready, you can just change the images, text, and links each time to write your newsletter.

Step 6. Monitor & Adjust

Once you start sending your nonprofit newsletters, it’s time to track your success. Your email marketing platform will offer reports and analytics for each email. You can use these reports to monitor how many people open your emails, click on your links, and unsubscribe from each email.

By paying attention to these email metrics, you can determine what your audience responds best to and then adjust your newsletter strategy accordingly.

Nonprofit Newsletter Tips & Best Practices

I’ve compiled these tips & best practices from my 15 years of writing, optimizing, and researching nonprofit email newsletters.

Whether you’re starting a brand new newsletter or improving one you already have, you can use these tips to better connect with your subscribers.

1. Write Enticing and Recognizable Subject Lines

Your email subject line is the first thing recipients see, so make it count. Neon One’s report found that nonprofit subject lines perform best when they include positive emotions, such as:

• Relief – Include words like “recovery” or “help”
• Gratitude – Thank subscribers for their support and generosity.
• Pride – Highlight your accomplishments with phrases like “1500 dogs rescued this year.”
• Excitement – Don’t be afraid to use exclamation points. Just don’t use them every time.
• Optimism – Include words like “change,” “hope,” and “future.”

Since you’re sending this newsletter on a regular schedule, you should also consider always starting your subject line the same way. That way, your subscribers can easily recognize it in their inbox.

For instance, I shared an example of a Women for Women International newsletter that shares impact stories. They start each subject line for these impact emails with “Sister Spotlight,” and they include sparkle emojis to highlight the phrase even more.

This designation helps these specific newsletters stand out from any of their other marketing emails.

Similarly, if your newsletter always includes the next month’s events or opportunities, that should be clear in your subject line, so subscribers don’t overlook your latest updates.

Bonus Tip: As you continue to hone your nonprofit newsletter, you can use your email marketing software to A/B test your subject lines. Services like Constant Contact let you A/B test with just a few clicks.

With A/B testing, you create 2 variants of your subject line. Each variant is sent to a small percentage of the email list. Your email platform tracks which subject line performs better and then sends that version to your full list.

By A/B testing your subject lines, you’ll improve the performance of that particular email and gradually learn what your target audience responds best to.

2. Experiment with Your Sender Name

It seems obvious to just use your organization name as your sender name. And in fact, there’s nothing wrong with doing that. However, sometimes it’s good for your messages to come from a specific person.

Here are some types of sender names you can try:

• Use the name of your head honcho: We’re not a nonprofit, but here at OptinMonster, we’ve had great success using “Angie at OptinMonster” as our email sender name. Angie is our general manager, and using her name shows that our company is made of real people who want to help our customers.
• Use the name of someone your subscriber knows: For the library newsletter I shared earlier, I used “Ms. Jessica at FLPL” as the sender name. As our children’s librarian, Jessica was the person kids and parents talked to when they checked out books or attended a storytime. By using her name, the emails felt like direct invitations from a friend.
• Use the name of someone you’ve helped: Are you sharing an individual’s impact story? Consider using their name as your sender name, especially if the email is written in their own words. For instance, the “Sister Spotlight” email I just discussed could have used “Grace for Women for Women International.”

3. Add & Optimize Preview Text

Your email marketing software will let you write your own preview text. That’s the short snippet that appears under the subject line in your email inbox.

Here’s an example of how preview text appears in a mobile inbox:

Your preview text is your chance to explain why subscribers should open your nonprofit newsletter.

Neon One found that the following preview text words had the most positive impact on nonprofit open rates:

• Together
• Hear
• Video
• Deadline

Need one more reason to add preview text? Neon One also discovered that fundraising emails that included preview text raised 53.85% more donations than those that didn’t.

4. Include Evocative Images

Your organization works every day to help people, animals, or an important cause. And your subscribers signed up for your nonprofit newsletter because they believe in the work you do.

You can strengthen that connection even further by featuring photos of your work in action.

Here’s an email from Habitat for Humanity. It includes a large photo of a woman named Xochitl in her Habitat-built home.

Here are some ideas for photos you can include in your nonprofit newsletters:

• People or animals you’ve helped
• Staff and volunteers working in the field
• Featured donors
• People enjoying events you’ve hosted
• Before-and-after images (e.g. community clean-up projects)
• Infographics illustrating your impact

5. Make Your Nonprofit Newsletter Scannable

Like all content on the internet, your email newsletters should be easy to scan quickly. If you’ve chosen a well-designed template, this goal should be easy to accomplish.

If you’re designing an email yourself, or heavily editing your template, these are some guidelines to follow:

• Use headings: Break up your text with headings so readers can easily find the info they’re looking for.
• Keep paragraphs short: No one wants to read a dense wall of text in an email, so keep your paragraphs brief.
• Use white space: Make sure you include some white space between each element of your email.
• Include photos and graphics: Break up your text with visuals that catch the reader’s eye.
• Use bulleted lists: Lists are another way to break up paragraphs and make text more scannable.
• Use bold text for emphasis: Bolding key phrases and sentences can make your paragraphs easier to scan.

6. Include a Clear Call to Action

Every newsletter should include at least one clear call to action (CTA) for your readers. That action can be:

• To donate
• To visit a specific page on your website
• To follow you on social media
• To take a survey

For more on CTAs, see our guide: What Is a Call to Action + 31 CTA Examples.

While every email should include a CTA, my next tip focuses on being cautious with your donation CTAs.

7. Don’t Ask for Donations TOO Often

If your organization depends on funds from donors, you’ll likely include a “Donate” CTA button in every newsletter. In fact, it’s a good idea to always offer an opportunity to give at the bottom of your emails, so potential donors have easy access.

However, don’t ask for donations too prominently or too frequently in every single email.

Your main goal for a nonprofit newsletter is to tell the story of your organization. In other words, your newsletter should show why your subscribers should want to donate to your cause.

After you’ve sent out a few impact-focused newsletters, THEN you can send your “big ask,” the email that focuses specifically on soliciting donations. Often, you’ll send your “big ask” email during a specific fundraising campaign or for a day like Giving Tuesday.

By the time your subscribers get your “big ask” message, they’ll be excited to donate to an organization that does so much good work. And you’ll avoid exhausting your supporters with too many requests for money.

8. Stick to Your Newsletter Schedule (& Inform Subscribers of that Schedule)

Earlier, I pointed out that choosing a newsletter schedule is a key step in developing a nonprofit newsletter. Now, it’s important to stick to that schedule.

Consistency is key to keeping subscribers engaged, and it builds trust with your organization. If you stray too much from your schedule, your nonprofit will appear unorganized.

On the other hand, adhering to your newsletter schedule demonstrates professionalism, dependability, and a strong commitment to your subscribers.

You should also always let your subscribers know how often you’ll email them. You can inform them of your newsletter frequency on your email sigup form or in your welcome email. If you need to change that frequency, simply notify them in one of your emails.

9. Never Neglect Your Email List

Once you’ve built a decent subscriber base, you may be tempted to just coast on that email list. However, you should always look for more ways to:

1. Discover supporters and potential supporters
2. Collect their contact information
3. Add them to your email list so you can maintain and grow their support

What exactly does this effort look like? It’ll vary depending on your type of organization. But anytime you’re engaging with stakeholders, you should offer the chance to sign up for your newsletter. That might mean including a sign-in sheet at events with a checkbox to subscribe. It can also mean sharing your newsletters on social media and including a CTA to sign up.

And if your website receives significant traffic, you should definitely ask visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

People visiting your website have already shown a high level of interest in your organization, and OptinMonster can help you convert them into subscribers and donors.

I wish I had known about OptinMonster when I worked in nonprofit marketing, especially during times when my subscriber number was stagnant. I didn’t have access to an experienced web developer, but I could have created email signup popups in just a few minutes with OptinMonster’s 700+ templates and easy drag-and-drop builder.

Want to give it a try? Sign up for OptinMonster today, with our 14-day, 100% money-back guarantee.

Tell Your Story With Nonprofit Newsletters

With an email newsletter, your nonprofit can engage your stakeholders, share your success stories, and encourage more people to support your organization.

If you want to continue to learn more about email marketing, here are some resources to help. While they’re not specifically geared toward nonprofits, the information will still help you send better emails:

• 17 Genius Tips for Better Email Copywriting
• Best Time to Send Emails: Insights from Top Studies
• What Is Email Segmentation? 50 Proven Ways to Segment Email Lists
• What Is Email Automation? A Beginner’s Guide

And if you’re ready to build an email list full of engaged subscribers, sign up for OptinMonster today!

In the world of online earning and digital marketing, affiliate marketing has carved out a significant niche, offering individuals and companies the opportunity to earn income by promoting products or services.

Email marketing is a powerful tool in this domain, enabling affiliate marketers to reach out directly to their audience with personalized messages and offers.

Today, I’m excited to dive into the top 6 email marketing affiliate programs in 2024, sharing insights and tips to help you maximize your affiliate marketing efforts.

More specifically we’ll cover:

• What is Affiliate Email Marketing?
• Benefits of Affiliate Email Marketing
• How to Choose an Email Marketing Affiliate Program
• 6 Best Email Marketing Affiliate Programs in 2024
• How to Launch an Affiliate Marketing Campaign in 4 Easy Steps
• The Key to Affiliate Email Marketing Success

Let’s get started!

What is Affiliate Email Marketing?

Affiliate email marketing is a strategy where affiliates use email campaigns to promote products or services and earn commissions from clicks, sales, or specific actions the recipient takes.

This approach involves sending targeted, personalized emails to a list of subscribers who have opted in to receive communications from the affiliate. The emails typically contain affiliate links to products or services that the affiliate believes will interest their audience.

When a recipient clicks on one of these links and makes a purchase or completes a desired action, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale or action.

Affiliate email marketing is a powerful tool for affiliates to monetize their email list, offering a win-win situation where subscribers receive valuable recommendations and affiliates earn income through commissions.

Benefits of Affiliate Email Marketing

Affiliate email marketing is a highly effective and efficient strategy for affiliates, offering several key benefits:

1. Cost-Effectiveness: Minimal startup costs and high ROI due to low overhead and high commission potential.
2. Direct and Personalized Communication: Enables targeted, personalized messages, building trust and loyalty with subscribers.
3. Measurable Results: Easy tracking of performance metrics like open rates and conversions, allowing for quick strategy adjustments.
4. Flexibility and Scalability: Adaptable promotional strategies for various products and scalable efforts without significant cost increases.
5. Increased Conversion Opportunities: Higher engagement and targeted promotions lead to better conversion rates.
6. Long-Term Asset Building: Builds a valuable email list as a long-term asset, supporting recurring revenue through ongoing promotions.

In essence, affiliate email marketing provides a direct, cost-effective way to engage and convert subscribers into customers, with the flexibility to adapt and scale efforts over time.

How to Choose an Email Marketing Affiliate Program

When choosing an email marketing affiliate program, consider these key factors for success:

1. Commission Structure: Look for competitive rates, recurring commissions, and reasonable payment terms.
2. Cookie Duration: Longer durations increase your chance of earning commissions.
3. Product Quality: Promote high-quality products or services you trust.
4. Audience Relevance: Select programs that match your audience’s interests.
5. Affiliate Support: Choose programs offering strong support and resources.
6. Reputation: Opt for programs with a positive industry reputation and reliable payment practices.
7. Ease of Use: Ensure both the affiliate platform and the product/service are user-friendly.
8. Compliance: Be aware of promotional restrictions and adhere to compliance requirements.
9. Personal Experience: Test the product or service when possible to enhance authenticity in your promotions.
10. Payout: Look at the program’s payout frequency and the minimum threshold to receive a recurring commission.

Focusing on these aspects will help you select an affiliate program that aligns with your goals and audience, optimizing your potential for success.

6 Best Email Marketing Affiliate Programs in 2024

Let’s dive into the cream of the crop, the top 6 email marketing affiliate programs that have stood out in 2024 for their robust offerings and affiliate-friendly terms.

1. ConvertKit Affiliate Program

Overview and Unique Selling Points

ConvertKit is designed specifically for creators, offering easy-to-use automation, a clean interface, and excellent integration capabilities. Its focus on helping bloggers, podcasters, and other content creators grow their audience and monetize their passions sets it apart.

Commission Structure

ConvertKit offers a 30% recurring lifetime commission for any customer you refer, providing a steady income stream for affiliates.

Pros: High-quality targeting towards creators, recurring commission model.

Cons: May not be as well-suited for non-creator niches or larger businesses.

How to Get Started

Apply directly on ConvertKit’s affiliate program page. They provide marketing materials and support to help you succeed.

2. GetResponse Affiliate Program

Overview and Unique Selling Points

GetResponse excels with its comprehensive suite of tools, including advanced automation, landing pages, and webinar hosting, catering to a broad spectrum of email marketing needs.

Commission Structure

Choose between a $100 one-time commission per sale or a 33% recurring commission, offering flexibility based on your strategy.

Pros: Versatile commission structure, wide range of features.

Cons: Complexity may deter beginners.

How to Get Started

Sign up via their affiliate program portal, where GetResponse provides extensive tracking and promotional resources.

3. Constant Contact Affiliate Program

Overview and Unique Selling Points

Constant Contact is favored for its user-friendly interface and effectiveness in helping small businesses achieve their marketing goals. Its extensive template library and social media integration tools are particularly noteworthy.

Commission Structure

Earn $5 for each referral that signs up for a free trial and $105 when they purchase a plan.

Pros: High commission for conversions, easy to use for beginners.

Cons: Lower commission for trial sign-ups.

How to Get Started

Register through Constant Contact’s affiliate program page to access promotional materials and start earning.

4. MailerLite Affiliate Program

Overview and Unique Selling Points

MailerLite‘s appeal lies in its simplicity and affordability, combined with a robust set of features such as automation, segmentation, and a built-in website builder.

Commission Structure

Offers a 30% lifetime recurring commission, rewarding long-term customer retention.

Pros: User-friendly for beginners, affordable pricing.

Cons: May lack some advanced features of larger platforms.

How to Get Started

Apply on MailerLite’s affiliate program website, where you’ll find resources to aid in your promotional efforts.

5. Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue)

Overview and Unique Selling Points

Brevo offers a comprehensive digital marketing platform beyond email, including SMS marketing, chat, and CRM tools. Its all-in-one approach is ideal for businesses looking to consolidate their marketing tools.

Commission Structure

Earn €5 for each signup and €100 for each new paying customer, providing a balanced incentive for both leads and conversions.

Pros: Versatile marketing tools, attractive for comprehensive digital marketing strategies.

Cons: The wide range of features might be overwhelming for those solely focused on email marketing.

How to Get Started

Join via Brevo’s affiliate program page, accessing a dashboard with tracking, assets, and support.

6. Omnisend Affiliate Program

Overview and Unique Selling Points

Omnisend specializes in e-commerce email marketing, offering advanced segmentation, personalization, and automation designed to increase sales. Its integration with major e-commerce platforms makes it a powerful tool for online retailers.

Commission Structure

Affiliates can earn a 20% recurring commission, emphasizing long-term customer value.

Pros: E-commerce focused features, strong automation capabilities.

Cons: Primarily suited for e-commerce, may not fit all niches.

How to Get Started

Sign up through Omnisend’s affiliate program to gain access to promotional materials tailored for e-commerce audiences.

Each of these programs offers unique advantages and opportunities for affiliates. By considering your audience’s needs and preferences, you can choose the right email marketing tools to promote, maximizing your affiliate earnings in 2024.

How to Launch an Affiliate Marketing Campaign in 4 Easy Steps

In a second, we’re going to get into the detailed steps for setting up your email campaigns for affiliate marketing. But first, you need to remember the number one rule for using affiliate links in your email sequence:

You’re not selling. You’re sharing.

So, what’s the difference?

You aren’t a sales representative for your affiliate links.

Instead, you’re a happy customer with the products you’re promoting. That makes talking about those products natural.

None of your emails should feel like a door-to-door sales message or a phone call that interrupts a family dinner. Those are super annoying.

Your emails should be more like having a casual conversation with a friend over coffee. You found something that improved your life in some way, and you want to let your friend in on the secret.

As we go through each step of launching an affiliate marketing campaign, you need to keep this friendly, conversational mentality in mind. Otherwise, you’ll ruin your relationship with your current customers and watch your hard-earned email list dwindle with unsubscribes.

So keep it light, keep it casual, and stay focused on sharing, not selling.

Now let’s dive in.

Step 1. Make Sure Your Affiliate Email Marketing Service Allows Affiliate Links

You need to make sure that whatever email provider you use for your email campaigns lets you include referral links.

Many email marketing solutions need to worry about their own deliverability rates, so they discourage affiliate marketing. Others flat out ban the practice.

If you’re not careful about your email service provider, you risk temporarily losing access to your account or, even worse, losing your entire mailing list.

That means back to square one.

You can avoid this by clarifying your email provider’s stance on affiliate marketing.

So long as you are following this step-by-step guide and adding affiliate links the correct way, you won’t have any problems launching an affiliate email marketing campaign.

Again, there are plenty of other email service providers out there that allow you to use affiliate marketing responsibly.

You may already have one.

Just be sure to contact their support team to verify before launching an affiliate email marketing campaign.

Step 2. Choose the Right Affiliate Links to Promote

Any affiliate links you choose to promote with your email list should have three qualities. They should be:

• Profitable
• Relevant to your niche
• Evergreen
  

Profitable

First, your affiliate links should be profitable. If your affiliate link has low or limited earning potential, you should ask yourself if you’ll see enough return on investment (ROI) to make the promotion worthwhile.

But wait. Isn’t affiliate marketing free? How could it have a poor ROI?

Yes, adding an affiliate email to your current sequence won’t cost any extra money. It takes a bit of time, however, which is just as valuable.

Plus, if you don’t create your affiliate email the right way, you may see an increase in unsubscribe rates.

So while you may not be spending any money to promote your affiliate links, you still have enough on the table to run a quick cost-benefit analysis in your head.

Since the average click-through rate for emails is 2.6%, you need to ask yourself if your affiliate commissions are high enough to make it worth your time.

For example, here are the commission rates for Amazon’s affiliate program:

If you had an email list for video game recommendations, this type of commission is hardly worth your time and effort. Imagine earning 1% on a $40 video game. You would need to get 1,000 people to buy the game to earn $400.

If you run a site on home maintenance, however, commissions would be much more appealing. You could see how earning 8% on a $300 lawnmower is more reasonable. You’d only need to get 17 people to buy from your link to reach the same $400.

When choosing which affiliate links to promote, make sure the earning potential is worth it.

Relevant to Your Niche

Next, your affiliate links need to be appropriate to your niche. That comes directly from our “share, don’t sell” rule mentioned above.

Your readers signed up to your email address for a reason. That’s huge. They liked your content so much that they gave you direct access to them anytime you want.

Don’t abuse that trust.

Whatever affiliate link you promote should have some logical connection to your niche. Otherwise, your email will come off as too “salesy.”

Think about it:

Imagine you signed up for a newsletter on a cooking website. You love their recipes, and each week they deliver some awesome ideas for family dinner.

And then, one day, you get an email from them talking about running shoes:

Kinda weird. But ok.

Then a few days go by, they send you more recipes, and life is all good. But then you get another email promoting hot yoga classes:

What do you do? Find the fastest way to the unsubscribe button and find another cooking website that isn’t using you to make a quick buck.

But now imagine that same cooking site had sent you cool links for steak knives or stainless steel cookware:

Chances are you would be happy to read that content in the email because it closely aligns with why you signed up in the first place: to learn more about cooking.

What would you do in that instance? Probably follow the link, learn more about the product, and likely make a purchase.

That’s why it’s important to be selective with the affiliate links you choose to promote. They need to be somehow related to the content you deliver because you already know your readers are interested in that topic.

Evergreen

Finally, your affiliate links should be evergreen when they’re part of an email campaign. By the term “evergreen,” we mean that the product you’re promoting is unlikely to change over the next few years.

In the example above from the cooking website, you can imagine having that stainless steel cookware in your email sequence for a long time without needing to adjust the email.

Choosing affiliate links that are evergreen saves you hours of headaches down the road.

But what if you have a killer product to promote that is specific to a particular holiday or only available for a limited time?

You can still use email marketing to get that information out there, but that promotion should be written separately from your email campaigns.

For example, you can imagine a sports trainer creating an affiliate link to Super Bowl merchandise. These are products that the audience is genuinely interested in, and it has a high commission rate.

The sports trainer could then write a special email (or even a unique email sequence, if they were so motivated) leading up to or shortly following the Super Bowl:

When the holiday or event is over, remove the emails from your sequence or shut down the entire campaign.

But, again, if you’re trying to work affiliate links into your email marketing campaigns for continuous passive income, they should be evergreen products. This way, you don’t constantly need to keep track of changing, updating, or tweaking your emails.

Step 3. Add Affiliate Emails to Your Sequence 

NoteThis post assumes that you already have an email sequence in place, or that you have some idea of how to structure one for your website or services. If not, no worries. But you’ll want to read this post on how to create an effective email autoresponder sequence before moving forward.

Ok, full disclosure: The phrase “affiliate email marketing sequence” is a bit of a misnomer. Why?

In the majority of cases, you shouldn’t have entire email campaigns dedicated solely to affiliate links. Doing so can lead to two problems for you.

First, your customers will likely get annoyed that you’re continually recommending 3rd party content to them.

And second, even the email service providers that allow affiliate marketing may close your account if your affiliate links are causing low deliverability rates. To avoid that, you should strive for the highest open rates possible in your email marketing campaigns.

That’s why using email marketing to promote affiliate links should be done in one of two ways:

• Subtly adding affiliate links into emails focused on other content
• Creating emails for affiliate products to an already existing sequence

Let’s look at the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy.

Adding Affiliate Links to Your Emails 

If you already have an email sequence in place that is getting high open and click-through rates, you may not want to tweak too many aspects of it.

As they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But if you have some valuable affiliate links you want to promote, you can always go back to the email copy and casually embed them in the message. This has a few benefits.

• Your open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates likely won’t be affected
• Your affiliate promotion links organically to your content
• You can usually add more affiliate links in the same email because the focus isn’t on any single product

This is some real ninja-style promotion that can build further passive income from a system that’s already working for you.

Here’s an example from Adam Enfroy’s 7-day email sequence:

He can embed an affiliate link to Bluehost directly in the content of his email. But remember, just because something is subtle doesn’t make it “sneaky.” Adam is open about using affiliate links and only uses those he trusts or uses himself.

There is just one drawback to embedding affiliate links to content in your existing email sequence: your affiliate links will get less attention, and, consequently, you’ll get lower commissions.

That’s why some marketers prefer this second method.

Add Affiliate Emails to an Existing Email Sequence

Even though different email sequences have different goals, you can break them down into the same parts:

• Building and nurturing relationships
• Recognize your audience’s existing problem
• Educating your audience about the theoretical solution
• Offering your audience a concrete solution through a product or service

The tricky part is that the amount of each component you use in your email sequence depends on your audience and your product.

In other words, there’s no “one size fits all” strategy for email marketing. And this is particularly true when you throw affiliate marketing into the formula.

So one great strategy is to take the sequence you’re already using and add a few new original emails to highlight your affiliate link.

Your affiliate marketing emails are special, though, because they’ll be a mixture of educational and promotional content all wrapped up in the same email.

Extra emphasis on the “educational” part.

Here’s why:

Your customers are on your email list because they like and trust you. But, when you promote an affiliate product, you’re throwing a stranger into the mix.

Your audience has no prior relationship with the company or product you’re suggesting.

That means they need to be warmed up a little more than they would be for an email promoting your services.

So when you write an email promoting an affiliate link, you need to spend time educating your audience about why you found it useful. You also need to show how it adds value to the niche you usually talk about.

Once you’ve crafted a few emails that are both highly educational and lead to a clear call to action, you can add them to your autoresponse email sequence.

So, for example, you could structure your email sequence as follows:

• Customer signs up to your email list
• Email 1: Welcome
• Email 2: Recognize your audience’s existing problem
• Email 3: Educate your audience about the theoretical solution
• Email 4: Affiliate link email with a concrete solution
• Email 5: Nurture the relationship with cool content
• Email 6: Nurture the relationship with cool content
• Email 7: Recognize your audience’s existing problem
• Email 8: Affiliate link email with a concrete solution

…and so on for however many months, or years, your sequence lasts.

But, again, this is just an example formula. You need to build, test, and monitor the email sequence that works best for you.

As you do so, remember these best practices that are true for all email sequences regardless of the goal:

• You should be nurturing and educating more than promoting
• Every email (especially promotions) should add value to your readers
• The frequency at which you send your emails should be consistent (avoid super long gaps of time in between)
• Each email should be a unique form of content
• Your affiliate promotions should have more educational information because your readers don’t have a pre-existing relationship with the 3rd party brand

Here’s the cool news, though. Once you add your leads to your autoresponder sequence, you can legitimately sit back and watch the money pour in.

As you grow your email list, each new subscriber becomes a part of your funnel and sees your affiliate promotions. So you’ll be creating passive income as long as you’re actively growing that email list.

Now, you could stop here, but let’s be honest: you’re interested in earning dollars, not pennies.

And if you want to level-up your affiliate marketing email campaigns, there’s one last thing you need to do.

Step 4. Tag, track, and tweak

You’ve got your email sequence locked down, it’s working autonomously, and you already see your commissions roll in.

That’s awesome. But if you want to keep seeing your commissions grow, you’ll need to play an active role in your email list’s maintenance.

In other words, you need to tag and track your subscribers’ so you can tweak your email campaigns as needed.

On our blog, we’ve talked a lot about audience segmentation. The same rules apply for affiliate marketing email campaigns. You should:

• Track where your subscribers came from
• Tag which links they click and what offers they optin for
• Monitor your open and click-through rates
• Tweak your sequences to make sure you send the right message to the right person

Ok, so what does all this mean?

Let’s say you run a health and fitness store. You currently have two landing pages to get new email subscribers. One landing page focuses on how to make easy meals when you’re retired. You can then repurpose this for a very targeted Facebook ad:

Your other landing page is more general and has a basic nutrition guide as a lead magnet for all ages:

Now you want to promote an affiliate link for a product that reduces inflammation in the joints and removes joint pain altogether. This particular product targets people over the age of 55.

To get the most success out of your affiliate marketing email campaign, you wouldn’t add a new affiliate email into the sequence for every subscriber. In this case, you would want to add this affiliate email only to those people who came from the Facebook ad (again, targeted to people in their 50’s and older).

So anyone who came from the Facebook ad would see your affiliate product, and anyone who subscribed from the general landing page wouldn’t.

Wait. Won’t you miss out on potential sales by not including everyone?

Maybe.

But you’re also going to see higher open and click-through rates, which helps your overall deliverability. Plus, those high open rates mean you’re less likely to end up in your readers’ spam folder.

And most importantly, you’re just less annoying to subscribers who wouldn’t find any value from that product.

So make sure you’re tracking all of your clients’ interactions with your emails so you can improve the accuracy of your email campaigns.

Related ContentWant to take your affiliate marketing game to the next level? Read this post on how earnings-per-click can make you win big at affiliate marketing.

The Key to Affiliate Email Marketing Success

Launching an affiliate email marketing campaign isn’t complicated, and with the number of affiliate programs currently out there, getting started has never been easier.

But if anyone can do it, why doesn’t everyone do it?

Honestly, the problem for most people is building an email list large enough to make affiliate marketing a viable endeavor.

That’s where OptinMonster comes in.

If you’re looking to grow your email list to promote your affiliate products, you should be using some conversion optimization toolkit like OptinMonster.

You can create targeted campaigns to capture your audience’s emails. Everything about these campaigns works to increase the number of leads you capture. And, our Exit-Intent® technology can increase conversion rates by 2-4% consistently.

One client even increased their conversions by 316%.

Again, whether you decide to go with OptinMonster or another lead generating software, you should have a conversion strategy in place. Since email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your affiliate products, building a strong email list with quality leads should be a top priority.

Are you feeling like you’ve hit a slump in growing your email list? Why not regain control of your conversions and join OptinMonster today!

More on Affiliate Marketing:

• 18 Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2024 All Marketers Must Know
• Earnings Per Click: How to Win Big at Affiliate Marketing
• Best Affiliate Marketing Tools: Top 15 Tools Every Affiliate Needs
• 15 Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Your Income
• How to Use Social Media for Affiliate Marketing
• How to Create an Affiliate Program & Increase Your Sales
• How to Increase Affiliate Sales by 30% With One Simple Strategy
• Best Marketing Automation Tools: Streamline Your Digital Campaigns
• 29 Best Email Marketing Platforms to Transform Your Business
• 6 Free Email Templates You Need To Try Right Now!
• 6 Best WordPress Landing Page Builder Plugins To Boost Sales
• SEO Made Easy—Ultimate Guide to Explode Your Traffic

Summary:

Email Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links in your email. It’s calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiplying by 100. For example, if you sent 1,000 emails and 50 recipients clicked on a link, your CTR would be 5%.

Here are 13 tips on how to improve email click-through rate:

1. Craft Compelling Subject Lines
2. Personalize Your Emails
3. Optimize Email Design
4. Segment Your Audience
5. Create Clear and Strong CTAs
6. A/B Test Your Emails
7. Use Engaging Visuals
8. Keep Content Relevant and Valuable
9. Send Emails at the Right Time
10. Utilize Interactive Elements
11. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness
12. Leverage Social Proof
13. Monitor and Analyze Performance

The click-through rate metric is more than just a number; it’s a powerful indicator of how well your audience engages with your content and a critical factor in driving conversions and boosting your digital marketing ROI.

Naturally, among the many email marketing metrics available to check the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, the one that stands out in particular is email click-through rate.

This article explains email click-through rate and teaches you how to improve it.

So, let’s dive in and unlock the full potential of your email campaigns!

• What Is Email Click-Through Rate
• Why Is Email CTR Important
• Average Email Click-Through Rate
• What Is a Good Click Through Rate for Email
• How To Increase Email Click-Through Rate

What Is a Good Click Through Rate for Email

A good click-through rate for email marketing can depend on various factors, such as the industry, the type of email, and the campaign’s specific goals. Here are some general benchmarks:

Industry-Specific CTR Benchmarks

• Technology: 5% to 7%
• Nonprofits: 4% to 6%
• E-commerce/Retail: 2% to 4%
• Healthcare: 3% to 5%
• Media and Publishing: 4% to 6%

Type of Email

• Newsletters: 3% to 5%
• Promotional Emails: 1% to 3%
• Transactional Emails: 5% and higher

How to Improve Your Email CTR: 13 Tips

1. Craft Compelling Subject Lines

The subject line is the first impression recipients get of your email. An enticing and relevant subject line increases the chances of your email being opened and clicked. Use action verbs, create urgency, and be clear about the email’s value. Personalization in the subject line, such as including the recipient’s name, can also boost open rates.

2. Personalize Your Emails

Personalization goes beyond using the recipient’s name. Tailor the email content based on the recipient’s preferences, past behaviors, or demographic information. Use dynamic content to show personalized product recommendations or relevant offers.

3. Optimize Email Design

Your emails should be visually appealing and easy to read. A clean, responsive design that adapts to various devices ensures a better user experience. Use a single-column layout, ample white space, and clear fonts. Ensure that your email is not cluttered and that the most important elements stand out.

4. Segment Your Audience

Segmentation allows you to send more relevant content to different groups within your audience. You can segment based on demographics, purchase history, engagement level, or interests. This targeted approach increases the relevance of your emails, leading to higher engagement and CTR.

5. Create Clear and Strong CTAs

Your call-to-action (CTA) should be prominent, clear, and compelling. Use action-oriented language that tells recipients exactly what you want them to do, such as “Shop Now,” “Learn More,” or “Get Started.” Make your CTA buttons stand out with contrasting colors and ensure they are easy to click on both desktop and mobile devices.

6. A/B Test Your Emails

A/B testing involves sending two variations of an email to a small segment of your audience to see which performs better. Test different elements such as subject lines, CTAs, images, and email copy. Use the results to optimize your emails for better performance.

7. Use Engaging Visuals

Incorporate high-quality images, videos, or GIFs to make your emails more visually appealing. Visual content can convey your message quickly and effectively, capturing the reader’s attention and encouraging clicks.

8. Keep Content Relevant and Valuable

Ensure that your email content is relevant and valuable to your audience. Avoid generic messages and focus on delivering useful information, such as tips, guides, or exclusive offers. The more value you provide, the more likely recipients are to engage with your emails.

9. Send Emails at the Right Time

The timing of your emails can significantly impact your CTR. Test different days of the week and times of day to determine when your audience is most likely to engage. Consider time zones and the typical daily routines of your recipients.

10. Utilize Interactive Elements

Interactive elements like polls, quizzes, or carousels can increase engagement and encourage clicks. These elements make your emails more dynamic and can capture the reader’s attention more effectively than static content.

11. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness

With many people reading emails on mobile devices, it’s crucial to ensure your emails are mobile-friendly. Use a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes, and make sure your links and buttons are easy to tap on smaller screens.

12. Leverage Social Proof

Including testimonials, reviews, or user-generated content can build trust and encourage clicks. Social proof reassures recipients that others have had positive experiences with your product or service, making them more likely to engage.

13. Monitor and Analyze Performance

Regularly track your email metrics and analyze performance. Look at which emails have higher CTRs and analyze what they have in common. Use these insights to inform future campaigns and continually improve your email strategy. Tools like Google Analytics and email marketing platforms’ built-in analytics can provide valuable data.

Implementing these strategies can help you create more engaging emails that encourage recipients to click through and interact with your content.

More on Email Marketing:

• How to Create a Winning Email Marketing Strategy
• 15 Email Marketing Best Practices to Build a Killer List
• 10 Brilliant Email Marketing Examples and Why We Love Them
• Small Business Email Marketing: 7 (Easy) Tips for Growth
• 6 Free Email Marketing Templates You Need To Try Right Now!
• 29 Best Email Automation Tools to Transform Your Business

I know a thing or two about how to grow and market a business. I’ve written this guide to email marketing as your step-by-step plan, complete with strategies, tactics, and my insider secrets.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a primary marketing channel that uses bulk emails to promote your products or services to a list of subscribers via email. Think of it as a key part of your marketing automation strategy, keeping your leads and customers in the loop and excited about what you have in store for them.

• What is Email Marketing?
• What Are the Advantages of Email Marketing?
• What Are the Disadvantages of Email Marketing?
• How to Do Email Marketing Successfully: A 5 Step Guide
  • Step 1: Define Your Goals
  • Step 2: Choose an Email Service Provider
  • Step 3: Create an Optin Form to Build Your Email List
  • Step 4: Select the Type of Email Marketing Campaign To Send
  • Step 5: Track Email Marketing Metrics
• 6 Biggest Email Marketing Challenges (And How to Solve Them)
  1. How to Build an Email List
  2. How to Ensure Emails Are Delivered
  3. How to Improve Email Open Rates
  4. How to Boost Email Conversion Rates
  5. How to Scale Your Email Marketing Efforts
• Frequently Asked Questions About Email Marketing (FAQs)
• Email Marketing Case Studies

What Are the Advantages of Email Marketing?

• For eCommerce businesses, email marketing lets you sell products, recover abandoned carts, and increase lifetime value.
• Small business owners can use email marketing to maintain brand awareness and build relationships over time.
• Email marketing is great for SaaS companies to turn subscribers into free trial users, and free trials into paying customers.
• Bloggers and publishers use email marketing to drive traffic to their websites and affiliate links, which means more revenue.
• Enterprise clients can scale their email marketing plan to reach thousands or even millions of customers at once.

There are many benefits of email marketing:

• People check their email a lot, up to 20 times a day.
• You own your email list and can email them whenever you’d like. This is unlike social media where algorithms control your reach and engagement.
• Emails can be personalized at scale.
• Email has an extremely high ROI (return on investment) of around 3600%. Calculate the ROI of email marketing and see for yourself.
• Email is 55 times more effective at customer acquisition than Facebook and Twitter put together.
• Shoppers who receive email marketing convert 3x more than those who don’t.

While the case for email is strong, there are a few downsides. I want to make sure you have a full understanding of email marketing, so I’ll go over these disadvantages next.

What Are the Disadvantages of Email Marketing?

Email marketing, despite its effectiveness, has several disadvantages:

• Spam: Emails marked as spam can lower open rates over time and hurt deliverability. Learn how to prevent emails from going to spam.
• Inbox overwhelm: Marketing emails can get lost in an inbox filled with marketing emails. Segment your list by their engagement, and maintain a consistent by not excessive mailing schedule to combat this.
• Design challenges: Emails that display inconsistently across devices or email clients can hurt the reader’s experience. Using your ESP’s responsive templates will usually prevent these challenges. Services like Litmus Email Tester can show how your emails perform on various devices and clients, too.
• Regulations and compliance: Privacy regulations like GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA require ongoing attention to avoid legal conflicts. Double opt-ins, and unsubscribe links in every email will help you comply with these regulations.
• List maintenance: Inactive and unengaged subscribers must be regularly removed from email lists.
• Cost: Email marketing service providers typically charge by subscriber, which means your cost increase as your list grows. Maintaining your list, and engaging with subscribers will help ensure every subscriber is worth your investment.

How to Do Email Marketing Successfully: A 5-Step Guide

There are five things I want you to do when you’re just getting started with email marketing:

1. Define Your Goals
2. Choose an Email Service Provider
3. Create an Optin Form to Build Your Email List
4. Select the Type of Email Marketing Campaign To Send
5. Track Email Marketing Metrics

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Before you spend money on an email marketing tool or type out that first email, you must identify your goals. Ask yourself:

• What do I want these subscribers to ultimately do after joining my list?
• What will convince them to join your list?
• What will you share on a regular basis to keep them interested?
• What will convince them to buy what you’re selling?

To write effective marketing emails, you need to know who you’re talking to. Are you reaching out to loyal customers or trying to win over new prospects? Understanding your audience’s age, location, interests, and buying habits will affect how you approach them in your messages. Once you know your target audience, tailor your message to them.

With these goals in mind, you can choose the tools you’ll use to implement your strategy.

Step 2: Choose an Email Service Provider

The first thing you need is an email service provider (ESP). An ESP will provide the tools you need to create, send, and manage email campaigns to your audience. Choosing the right email marketing software with the features you need can keep costs manageable. I’ll go over some cost-effective options for email marketing software below:

1. Constant Contact

Best for: I think it’s the best email service provider for small businesses.

Constant Contact’s user-friendly and powerful features help small businesses engage their audience with easy to use templates and automations.

Check out our full Constant Contact review or our tutorial for building a Constant Contact email form.

2. Brevo

Best for: I think it’s the best marketing automation creator for small businesses.

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is a versatile email service provider offers an all-in-one solution for small businesses. With Brevo, you can create beautiful email and SMS campaigns. Not every email platform offers SMS, so if text marketing is something you’re interested exploring, Brevo would be a good option.

Read our Brevo review for more details and learn how to create a Brevo (Sendinblue) popup.

3. Hubspot

Best for: I think it’s the best email service provider for B2B businesses.

Hubspot offers a comprehensive suite of marketing tools to help small businesses grow their audience and drive conversions. Hubspot’s CRM is also integrated with their email marketing service. This makes Hubspot a great choice for B2B and service-based businesses that have a longer sales process.

See the full Hubspot review to decide if Hubspot is right for you. If it is, we have a tutorial for how to add a Hubspot popup and other signup forms.

4. Omnisend

Best for: I think it’s the best multichannel marketing for small businesses.

Omnisend understands the needs of eCommerce businesses uniquely. Omnisend helps you create email campaigns, push notifications, and SMS messages that drive sales.

5. Drip

Best for: I think it’s the best email service provider for eCommerce store owners.

Drip was designed for eCommerce with advanced automation features that allow you to personalize your customer purchase journeys.

Read our full review of Drip and learn how to add an eye-catching Drip popup.

6. ConvertKit

Best for: I think it’s the best email service provider for bloggers and digital content creators.

Built specifically for bloggers and creatives, ConvertKit makes it easy to build and nurture your audience. With its intuitive interface and powerful automation capabilities, ConvertKit helps you deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. You can even use ConvertKit to sell simple digital products straight from the ESP dashboard.

For more details, check out our ConvertKit review and see how easy it is to create a ConvertKit popup form.

7. MailerLite

Best for: I think it’s the best free email service provider for small businesses, bloggers, and startups on a budget.

MailerLite is a user-friendly email service provider helps small businesses start using email marketing fast. They have a generous free plan and their paid upgrades are affordable.

Read more in our MailerLite review and check out how to make a MailerLite popup in minutes.

8. Mailchimp

Best for: It’s the most popular email service provider, best for almost all types of businesses and content creators.

Mailchimp has been a go-to email service provider for small businesses for years. Mailchimp allows you to create email campaigns, automate your marketing efforts, and analyze your results.

Explore our in-depth Mailchimp review or learn how to create a MailChimp popup.

Once you pick an ESP, the next step is to create your first optin form.

Step 3: Create an Optin Form to Build Your Email List

An optin form is the place where visitors can subscribe to your email list. Optin forms are also known as signup forms or lead generation forms.

Every email marketing service offers basic optin forms, usually a popup and an inline form, with limited customization options. You can extend the functionality of those optin forms with OptinMonster. This is especially helpful when you use Lead Magnets like an ebook, discount code, or cheat sheet to encourage your visitors to subscribe to your email list.

Offering lead magnets in exchange for an email is a great way to overcome that “Inbox Overwhelm” I mentioned earlier. That’s because they help you segment your email list by the visitor’s interests. Once your visitor tells you what they’re interested in by subscribing to receive a specific lead magnet, you can send them emails and offers about those interests.

We built OptinMonster for that exact reason! I needed software for WPBeginner.com that would let me treat each of my subscribers as the individual person they are, rather than just one of thousands on an email list, but it didn’t exist at the time.

At OptinMonster, we offer robust email optin forms with 1-click integrations to every major email marketing service on the market.

We offer different styles of forms, including:

• Inline forms embedded within your content
• Popup forms that appear over your main page content
• Widget optin forms in the header, footer, or sidebar of your WordPress site
• Floating bar forms that float over the top or bottom of your site
• Slide-in forms that scroll in from a bottom corner
• Coupon spin wheels and other gamified forms

All this without needing a coder or graphic designer, too.

Not only is it easy to create optin forms, we make sure that your forms show up in front of the right audience at the right time. With OptinMonster you can…

• catch abandoning visitors before they leave
• target users by the page they’re visiting
• generate leads based based on geographic location
• and much more!

We built the tool we needed to grow an email marketing list the right way. Try OptinMonster today see for yourself!

Enough about OptinMonster – let’s move on to what you’ll send after someone subscribes to your email list.

Step 4: Select the Type of Email Marketing Campaign To Send

Every email marketing service provider comes with an email editor you can use to send emails to your subscribers. I’ve outlined seven types of email marketing campaigns you can send below. I use all of these throughout my businesses.

I’ve also included links to more in depth examples of each type of email marketing campaign in case you want to dive deep.

1. Welcome Emails

Send welcome emails to new subscribers or customers as soon as they join your list. Use these emails to introduce your business and thank the reader for engaging with your brand. All this helps begin the relationship with your brand on a positive note.

This is an example of the first few paragraphs of the welcome email we send ourselves here at OptinMonster:

It includes a personal welcome from my co-founder, Thomas Griffin. It also includes links to documentation and directions for how to reach support. Likewise, your Welcome email should include the most important next steps a new subscriber should take after joining your list.

To learn more about how to write the perfect welcome email, check out the video below.

2. Newsletter Emails

Newsletter emails are regular communications sent to subscribers. Newsletter contain news, updates, tips, promotions, or curated information related to your business or industry. The goal of an email newsletter is to keep your audience engaged.

Here are some newsletter ideas you can use for your own list.

3. Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing emails are sent to potential customers who have shown interest in your offer, but haven’t bought yet. The goal is to build trust, educate, and overcome objections. Ultimately, you want to guide leads towards making a purchase decision.

Learn how to nurture leads with an email marketing funnel.

4. Promotional Emails

Promotional emails highlight new products, sales, or special events from your business. They create a sense of urgency and encourage recipients to take advantage of the promotion. You can send these one campaign at a time or automate a whole series of promotional emails.

Check out these promotional email examples if you need some ideas.

5. Seasonal Marketing Emails

Seasonal marketing emails include special offers, promotions, or content tailored to a holiday or season. The aim is to use the festive spirit to increase urgency and engagement.

Take a look at these seasonal marketing emails for Black Friday, Halloween, or Mother’s Day.

6. Transactional Emails

Specific actions or events trigger transactional emails. Customers might receive transactional emails for account updates, shipping notifications, or password resets. They provide information related to the transaction and ensure a smooth customer experience.

Learn more about how to write transactional emails that can grow your business.

7. Confirmation Emails

Confirmation emails verify or confirm an action taken by the recipient. You can send confirmations for subscribing to a newsletter, registering for an event, or buying a product. Confirmation emails typically contain details of the action. They may also provide other instructions or information.

Read about best practices and examples of outstanding confirmation emails.

No matter what type of email campaign you choose to send, there are a four important elements of an email campaign you should include.

1. Subject Line and Pre-header Text

This subject line appears first in your subscriber’s inbox and should give the reader a reason to open the email.

The pre-header text sometimes appears next to the subject line in the subscriber’s inbox. It is shown even before the reader opens the email, and is another opportunity for you to persuade your reader to open the email.

2. Content

Most email marketing services provide a selection of ready-to-use, easily customizable templates. Or, you can choose a plain-text template if you’d like your email to appear more like it came from a single person, rather than a brand. We often use plain-text emails at OptinMonster to build relationships with our readers.

3. Call to Action (CTA)

Every email should share an action you’d like your reader to take after reading your email, called a “Call To Action” or “CTA.”

Some common CTAs include:

• Make a purchase
• Download a freebie
• Read a blog post
• Follow your brand on social media
• Forward this email to a friend

A good Call To Action can often make or break the success of an individual email. We teach how to create the perfect call to action in OptinMonster University (free with any OptinMonster subscription).

4. Subscription Management

At the bottom of every email, you should have a link to unsubscribe. Email marketing is a consent-based channel. It’s better to let uninterested subscribers leave your list than risk them sending your emails to the spam folder.

One way to reduce unsubscribe rates is to also include a link where people can manage their own subscriptions. Giving them a way to opt out of certain topics or hear from you less often shows that you value their experience.

This brings us to the last step in our guide: monitoring your progress.

5. Track Email Marketing Metrics

After sending your email, track and analyze key email metrics such as:

• Open rate: how many subscribers opened the email
• Click-through rates: how many subscribers clicked links in the email
• Conversion rate: how many subscribers made a purchase, filled out a form, or did some other conversion you want to track
• Unsubscribe rates: how many subscribers unsubscribed from an email
• Deliverability rate: how many subscribers received your email in their main inbox

Use this data to refine your future email campaigns and optimize your strategies.

I also recommend that you regularly clean your email list. Removing invalid or inactive email addresses improves deliverability. Keeping your list clean also ensures that you’re targeting an engaged audience.

Now that you know how to do email marketing, let’s take a look at some common challenges you might face and how to overcome them. I’m sharing these to help you not make the same mistakes I’ve made over the years.

6 Biggest Email Marketing Challenges (And How to Solve Them)

Effective email marketing is relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are a lot of different factors involved and, unfortunately, writing good emails isn’t always enough.

We have a full list of email marketing best practices you can read for more detail, but here are some of the most common challenges you might encounter, along with the solutions I used myself.

1. How to Build an Email List

The first challenge is finding people to whom to send emails. Fortunately, this is perhaps the easiest problem to solve!

Even if you have no subscribers, you can build an email list from scratch with email signup forms on your website.

Solution: To get more signups, make sure that visitors clearly understand the benefits of joining your list.

• Adjust your call to action to focus on the benefits, such as “Get your free guide now!”
• Use social proof by showing off how many people have already signed up for your list.
• Add your optin forms to these high-converting places for email signups for best results.
• Take inspiration from high-performing email signup forms.

For more ideas, check out our top list-building tools and ways to build your email list for free.

2. How to Make Sure Emails are Delivered

If getting people on your list is the FIRST challenge, making sure the emails you’re sending actually land in their inbox is the hardest. Average deliverability rates hover around 81%, which means up to 20% of your emails may never even make it to your subscriber’s email client! This is especially relevant with Gmail’s updated requirements for bulk sending in 2024.

Solution: Follow email deliverability best practices to make sure your emails make it into the right inbox.

• Avoid spammy words that trigger spam filters. These might include words like “click,” “free,” “trial,” “cost,” “cheap,” “prize,” or unusual capitalization and punctuation.
• Clean your email list regularly to remove inactive subscribers.
• Segment your emails so that subscribers get content they actually care about.
• Provide ways for users to manage their own subscriptions instead of unsubscribing or reporting as spam.
• Ensure you’re following Gmail’s advice for bulk sending.

I highly encourage you to review the email deliverability best practices above. It’s a painful feeling to find out your hard-work crafting the perfect email was wasted when your emails didn’t land in the inbox (trust me, I learned this lesson the hard way!)

3. How to Improve Email Open Rates

The average open rate for emails is around 21%. There are plenty of ways that you can improve your email open rates.

Solution: Write and send high-quality emails. Everything from the email subject line to the email template design should be a valuable, pleasant experience for subscribers. If you can convince them to open one email, they’ll be more likely to open future emails.

• Make your subject line exciting and informative enough for people to click on. Remember that the job of the subject line is to get readers interested enough to open the email.
• Keep your subject line length short and easy to understand.
• Use preview text to provide extra insight into what’s in your email content.
• Improve your email copy by thinking back to your goal-setting. What information, skills, or products do your customers need to solve their problems? Deliver content that helps address those issues.
• Optimize your email design, especially for mobile devices. Use visuals wisely and make sure they show up well on different screen sizes. You can also make mobile optins that show up well on smaller device sizes.

4. How to Boost Email Conversion Rates

Let’s say you’re getting a healthy number of signups. Subscribers are receiving and opening your emails. But no one is clicking or buying.

You aren’t alone. The average email conversion rate in a study by Klaviyo ranged from just 0.1% to over 3%.

Solution: Improve your conversion rates by tuning into what your audience needs and wants.

• List segmentation means dividing your list into different groups. You can then send each group more targeted messaging that should improve your conversion rates. Learn about different ways to segment your email list and see what works best for your business.
• Personalized email content goes beyond saying, “Hey, FIRST NAME!” You could send product recommendations based on past purchases. Other personalization techniques include sending location-specific offers or content based on demographics. When subscribers receive personalized emails, customer loyalty is likely to increase.
• A/B testing your email newsletters can help you find the most effective subject lines, content, email templates, and CTAs. Many email service providers have split testing functionality built in.

5. How to Scale Email Marketing

So what if your email marketing strategy is working pretty well, but takes more time than you have?

Creating personalized content for a few segments is one thing. But as you add more subscribers, offers, and promotions, your email marketing will get more complex. Fortunately, we have strategies and resources to help you scale.

Solution: Work smarter, not harder. Build on what already works in your own email marketing or strategies that others have proven.

• Add or expand email automation. For example, you could set up an abandoned cart email series that encourages shoppers to finish their purchases. There are plenty of email marketing automation tools to make this easier. Check out our complete guide to eCommerce email marketing automation for more information.
• Use templates, examples, and best practices. Use these email marketing templates, copywriting templates and formulas, and best sales email subject lines for inspiration.

6. How to Run Email Campaigns in Multiple Languages

We are living in a more globalized world than ever before. This presents many opportunities to tap into foreign markets and expand your business activities. Since we recognize the amazing growth potential that email marketing campaigns present, why not multiply that potential by reaching a global audience in their native languages? 

The “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy – B2C” study, which surveyed over 8,000 consumers in over 29 countries, revealed that 65% of respondents prefer content in their native language. Moreover, 40% of respondents said that they would not purchase a product or service if it was not offered in their language.

So how do you make sure you don’t miss out on such a large percentage of your potential customers?

Solution: Collect and segment your multilingual leads for multilingual campaigns.

• By using OptinMonster with WPML, you can display popups in multiple languages and collect leads with data about their language preferences. 
• Segment your leads based on language and target them in culturally appropriate multilingual campaigns using your preferred email marketing integration. 

As a result, you will expand your campaign reach, enhance customer engagement, improve customer loyalty, and have an advantage over competitors who don’t employ multilingual strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions About Email Marketing (FAQs)

When is the best time to send a marketing email?

The best time to send a marketing email is between 9 AM to 12 PM on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, according to a HubSpot study. Test different times to find when your audience is most active and engaged. I’ve found these times to be true for our companies, too.

What is a good open rate for email marketing?

A good open rate is between 15% and 25%, but it varies by industry. Focus on improving engagement and personalization. I like to tell people a good open rate is the one that’s better than the one you’re getting now – there is always room to improve!

How often should I send marketing emails?

Send emails at a consistent frequency without overwhelming subscribers. Start with once a week or bi-weekly and adjust the timing and number of emails based on feedback and engagement metrics.

What email metrics should I track?

Track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. You should also track deliverability, spam complaints, and list growth rate.

What is the difference between single opt-in and double opt-in?

Single opt-in immediately adds subscribers to the list. Double opt-in requires confirmation via a verification email. Double opt-in ensures higher quality but may result in fewer subscribers. Consider your business goals, customer preferences, and local regulations such as GDPR.

Email Marketing Case Studies

Now you have all the knowledge you need to use email to grow your business! I’ve gone over:

• basic email marketing vocabulary and definitions
• different email marketing platforms you can use
• a step-by-step guide for how to do email marketing
• pro tips to take your email marketing to the next level

Email marketing isn’t something you set and forget, even with the power of automated workflows. You always want to be testing and refining your strategy. So I recommend bookmarking this page so you can come back later whenever you need to explore the resources I’ve shared.

I want to leave you with some encouraging case studies of companies just like yours who grew their email lists using the principles shared in this Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing. They have been nice enough to share their entire strategy, complete with screenshots of their email optins, and data about how they improved. You’ll learn how you make money from email marketing in every case study.

• How Nick Gray Increased Conversions by up to 1000% With Smart Opt-in Popups
• How PortraitFlip Converts Over 3% of Its Mobile Traffic into Leads
• How Medstar Media Increased Their Clients’ Conversions by 500%

There’s a lot of money to be made with email marketing. Whether you’re a blogger, affiliate marketer, an eCommerce store, or an online business, I and my team here at OptinMonster are here to help you win every step of the way.

Best wishes for your success,

Syed Balkhi

Many businesses start an email newsletter because they’ve been told email marketing has the best ROI among digital marketing channels.

But they don’t actually know how to make money from email marketing newsletters. They end up producing content that doesn’t lead to sales or profit. Or they give up because it’s too much work for too little reward.

Good news! Email marketing doesn’t have to be a slog. Once you know how to make money from email marketing, you’ll want to write newsletters all the time.

I’ve worked in email marketing for 15 years, and in this article, I’ll share 13 ways to make money from your email newsletter.

Are you ready? Let’s get started!

How Do Newsletters Make Money?

Email newsletters can make money in 3 basic ways:

1. As part of a larger sales funnel
2. By charging for the content itself
3. By monetizing your audience or access to your audience

Email newsletters are a bit like blog content. You own the channel, and you can create whatever content you want. The only difference is that email is sent directly to subscribers who have chosen to hear from you, while blog posts rely on search and referral traffic.

Because of this similarity, many of the ways to make money from a blog apply to email newsletters, as well.

In the next section, I’ll go over strategies from each of the above categories.

Top 13 Ways to Monetize Your Newsletter

In this section, I’ll first go over how to use email newsletters as part of your sales funnel. I emphasize these strategies first because you don’t need a large email list to run a profitable sales funnel.

Monetizing your content or audience generally requires more subscribers to make any meaningful revenue, but it’s certainly possible even with a smaller list. So, we’ll also go over how to make money with your email marketing content itself.

Here’s a table of contents to help you find what you’re looking for:

• Newsletters for eCommerce Sales Funnels
• Newsletters for Small Business Sales Funnels
• Newsletters for Nonprofit Sales Funnels
• How to Make Money From Any Email Newsletter
• FAQ About How To Make Money From Email Marketing Newsletters

How to Monetize Newsletters for eCommerce Sales Funnels

You can achieve a high conversion rate with eCommerce email newsletters because customers are already looking to buy when they subscribe to your list. Here are 3 ways to use email marketing in your eCommerce sales funnel:

1. Upsell, Downsell, Cross-sell

When it comes to email marketing in eCommerce, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells are your best friends.

These terms all sound a bit similar, so let’s clarify what they mean:

• Upsell: You promote a product that’s more expensive than what your customers have already purchased in the past, such as an upgrade or extension.
• Downsell: You promote a product that costs less than what the customer currently has in their cart but didn’t purchase. This is a great way to recover carts that would be abandoned because of price.
• Cross-sell: You promote related products regardless of pricing. They may be products that complement items the customer is already purchasing or items you think they’d also like

If you’re able to track your customer’s purchase history or abandoned carts, sending these newsletters should be a breeze. You’ll simply write a few emails for your most popular products and send them to your audience through email automation.

For even better results, make sure you segment your audience, too. This is where you organize your contact list by different subscriber traits, such as location, demographics, or purchase history.

Did you know that you can also display targeted promotional campaigns on your website with OptinMonster?

OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool for growing your list and bringing customers into your sales funnel.

It allows anyone to quickly and easily create stunning optin campaigns in minutes.

By “optin campaigns,” we simply mean things you’re already familiar with, like popups, floating bars, fullscreen welcome mats, and more.

Best of all, you can even use OptinMonster’s OnSite Follow Up Campaigns to highlight new products, recommend products to customers who have opted in for a coupon, or to present a low-cost offer immediately after they opt in.

2. Send Seasonal Promotions

Another way to make money with your email newsletters is to promote your seasonal offers. This would be for major holidays like:

• Halloween
• Black Friday
• Winter holidays
• Valentine’s Day
• Labor Day
• And more…

Or you can simply run specials that are unique to your store. For example, you may sell a seasonal or weather-dependent product like blankets. You could run a promotion the week of the first frost. You also could do a mid-summer clearance to move inventory from the previous season, and boost sales during the slow season.

Regardless, you can easily send these offers to your mailing list to increase your site’s bottom line.

You can also create matching campaigns on your website with OptinMonster. Most people need to see an offer multiple times before they decide.

With OptinMonster’s targeting rules, you can show your email subscribers special seasonal offers. This is an easy way to build a personalized customer experience that can lead to more conversions.

3. Start a VIP Program

A subscriber-exclusive VIP program is a great way to build your list and generate more sales. You can create a special optin form using OptinMonster’s drag-and-drop builder. To make it a true VIP experience, this optin can be shown only to past customers or visitors who have been to your site several times already.

Then, you can send special promotions and updates to this list. These customers will be the most eager to hear from you, so you can hope for a higher conversion rate from your VIP list.

Newsletters for Small Business Sales Funnels

If you run a small business that isn’t eCommerce-based, you might be wondering how you can monetize your newsletters.

The good news is that email marketing is great for building relationships that lead to client inquiries and referrals. Even if a subscriber doesn’t hire you directly, they might recommend you to someone if you’ve delivered enough value in your email newsletter.

Here are 3 ways to market your small business in your email newsletter:

4. Fill Openings In Your Calendar

Unbooked slots are terrible for service providers because you’re often paying your overhead expenses whether you have a client or not. You can use your email newsletter to fill slots in your calendar, sometimes with very short notice.

Your email list is likely filled with past clients or at least visitors who are big enough fans to hand over their email addresses. That’s why sending an email may be more effective than other marketing when it comes to filling last-minute slots.

You can also use your newsletter to book your calendar out farther in advance. For example, if you know you’ll be going on parental leave or extended vacation, you can offer your remaining slots to your email list. This will help create both a sense of urgency and exclusivity, both of which can boost your bookings.

5. Promote Digital Products

Contrary to what you may hear on the Internet, digital products don’t just sell themselves once you create them. Just like eCommerce products, digital products need promotion and marketing, too. Your newsletter is a great place to do that.

It doesn’t need to be a direct sales pitch, although it can be if you’re launching a new or limited-time seasonal product. Occasional mentions can reap big rewards over time.

Remember: your subscribers opted in to learn from your expertise. If you have a digital product that can help them, send out a free email about the same topic. Include a soft pitch for your product and a link where subscribers can buy.

As with eCommerce, you can set up corresponding campaigns for your digital products using OptinMonster.

6. Sell Workshops and Group Programs

Email newsletters are a great way to drive registrations to workshops or group programs.

Your subscriber list is essentially a group of your biggest fans, so they’re likely to be interested in face-to-face opportunities. If you’ve been delivering helpful content in your newsletters, this is especially true.

Workshops and group programs can be more affordable for your subscribers who can’t afford to work with you individually, and emails are a perfect way to promote them. Alternatively, you can email out a chance to win 1 free consultation or session, which can build interest for your paid services.

You can also use free workshops as a list builder, like in the popup example below. OptinMonster integrates seamlessly with WPForms so you can easily show popup registration forms on your website and manage your registrations.

Alternatively, you can simply add fields directly into your OptinMonster campaign with our drag-and-drop builder.

Newsletters for Nonprofit Donor Funnels

Just because an organization is a nonprofit doesn’t mean it doesn’t need money to operate. You can use your nonprofit email marketing newsletter as a way to raise awareness, fundraise, and recruit volunteers.

7. Share Impact Stories

Your nonprofit newsletter is a great place to share how your organization is making a difference.

Every newsletter is an opportunity to highlight someone who benefits from your work and to ask for donations to help you continue in your mission. Here’s a great example from Habitat for Humanity:

8. Create a Recurring Givers Program

Another way to monetize your nonprofit newsletter is to create a special community for recurring givers.

It’s similar to a VIP program for eCommerce, but instead of sending coupons and promotions, you can send exclusive updates or invitations to special donor events. Here’s an example from Celebrate EDU

9. Recruit Volunteers

Nonprofits need volunteers as much as they need funds. Plus, volunteers often become donors, and some grant funding is contingent upon volunteer service hours. Growing your volunteer force can help your nonprofit’s bottom line.

Your nonprofit email marketing newsletter is a great place to remind supporters that they can give their time as well as their money.

On your site, you can use OptinMonster to build a list of potential volunteers. Then, you can send out profiles and testimonials from current volunteers, volunteer training dates, and special or ongoing volunteer opportunities.

How to Make Money From Any Email Newsletter

Our final 4 newsletter monetization tips can be applied to any industry or business model. You can even make the newsletter itself your primary product, just like with blogging. You’ll need to grow a much bigger audience to make a full-time living from it, but with the right tools and strategies, you can do it!

10. Paid Subscriptions

One of the most straightforward ways to make money from email marketing newsletters is to sell subscriptions.

That’s right, just like print magazines and newspapers! (Remember those?)

In its simplest form, here’s how newsletter subscriptions work:

• You create content for your newsletter.
• Subscribers pay to access it.

That’s it! Many creators use a limited freemium model to grow their lists. Free subscribers get a preview or less frequent newsletters. Premium subscribers, on the other hand, get full or more frequent newsletters.

You can use services like Substack or Patreon to sell subscriptions to your newsletter, but you’ll have to pay monthly fees based on your number of subscribers, plus any regular payment processing fees.

We prefer to use a self-hosted option like WPForms to create a recurring payment form that is then linked to your email service provider (ESP). You can learn how to create a recurring payment form and how to create a newsletter signup form.

Another option is to use a membership plugin to create a paid newsletter in WordPress.

Resource: 5 Best WordPress Newsletter Plugins in 2023 for More Engagement

11. Email Courses

A variation on paid subscriptions is paid email courses.

Rather than selling ongoing new content, you sell a pre-made online course delivered by email. In your course, you teach something specific in bite-sized pieces.

This is a great way to deliver online course content without paying for a separate course platform.

Email courses also make great lead magnets if you decide to offer one for free.

12. Sponsorship

Just like blog posts and podcast episodes, email newsletters can be sponsored. This essentially means that a brand pays you to mention their company or product in your email newsletter.

This can be a small blurb at the end of your email similar to a classified ad in the newspaper, or it can be a more prominent feature near the top of your newsletter.

Either way, you want to be transparent about what content is sponsored by whom. You also want to respect your subscribers. They subscribed to hear from you about your area of expertise, not your sponsors. Always make sure your sponsored content aligns with your own content.

13. Affiliate Links

An easy way to monetize your email newsletter is through affiliate marketing. Here’s how it works:

• You promote affiliate products in your newsletter and on your site
• Your audience buys those products from your unique affiliate links
• You get a commission from those sales

It really is that simple!

But remember, the goal isn’t to SPAM your audience.

Writing over-the-top sales pitches for all your affiliate products and sending out 5 emails a day is a great way to get flagged for spam and kill your deliverability rates.

Instead, think of affiliate recommendations like making suggestions to your friends. Only promote products you actually use and love. It shouldn’t be the core of your email marketing strategy.

You can use OptinMonster to promote your affiliates on your website and encourage subscriber signups.

In fact, Human Food Bar was able to grow their email list and generate $17,000+ in affiliate sales with OptinMonster:

If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, Pretty Links is a great tool to help you manage your affiliate links in your newsletters and on your website. Pretty Links shortens long, ugly affiliate links into clean, memorable, speakable, totally shareable links.

For a more in-depth look, check out this helpful resource: How to Make Money While You Sleep With Affiliate Marketing.

FAQ About How To Make Money From Email Marketing Newsletters

How Much Money Can You Make with Email Marketing?

The sky is truly the limit when it comes to your ROI on email marketing. In general, you’ll get out what you put in. Create high-quality content and respect your subscribers, and they’ll reward you. Spam your list with too many affiliate links or promotional material, and you’ll lose subscribers and credibility.

That being said, for most small businesses, using email newsletters as part of your existing sales funnel will make more money more quickly than placing affiliate links or sponsored content in your newsletters.

How Many Subscribers Do You Need To Monetize a Newsletter?

Many people think you need a huge list to make money from an email newsletter, but that’s not always true. A small but targeted and engaged email list is nearly always more profitable than a large, unorganized list.

There are no hard and fast rules for how many subscribers you need to monetize. But in general, here are the strategies in order of how many subscribers you’d need to see a decent ROI, from least to most subscribers:

1. Booking clients from your email list: Depending on how much your services cost, you may only need a few people from your list to hire you in order to be profitable.
2. Promoting your own products: This will vary depending on how much your products cost, but you’ll keep all the money from product sales so you need to make fewer sales compared to affiliate link sales.
3. Selling subscriptions or email courses: Most customers won’t want to pay a lot for a paid newsletter or email course, but at least when selling your own content, you’ll keep all profits.
4. Sponsorships: You can make decent money from sponsored content without thousands of subscribers, but you’ll need to spend time building a highly engaged list before brands will want to work with you.
5. Affiliate links: You’ll only earn a small commission on any sales, so you’ll need a lot of active subscribers clicking on and purchasing through your affiliate links before you see any significant ROI.

Make sure you set up Google Analytics email tracking so you can see which newsletter topics or formats get the most conversions.

How Do I Get More Email Subscribers?

We’re so glad you asked! We could talk about list-building all day, but here’s short answer to how to get more subscribers:

1. Offer a persuasive lead magnet for subscribers to join your newsletter
2. Create engaging optin forms and share them widely
3. Deliver valuable newsletter content to your subscribers

Build Your Email List & Monetize Your Newsletter!

With these 13 tips, you now know how to monetize your newsletter and earn a profit from your email marketing efforts, no matter what business model or stage you’re in!

Want to learn even more about email newsletters? Here are a few resources:

• Email Newsletter Design Examples & 13 Pro Design Tips
• 29 Awesome Newsletter Ideas That Will Keep Subscribers Engaged
• 10 Inspiring Email Newsletter Signup Examples that Convert

You can only make money from your newsletters if you have subscribers, and OptinMonster is the best way to build an email list full of highly engaged subscribers.

Running an online business is hard. Without a strong email marketing strategy, it can be impossible to build the meaningful customer relationships required for growth.

Fortunately, you don’t have to come up with eCommerce email ideas on your own.

In this article, I’ll explore 10 types of eCommerce email campaigns, along with real-life examples of each type. I’ll also share some email marketing best practices that will help you drive sales for your eCommerce store.

• What Is eCommerce Email Marketing?
• 10 Types of eCommerce Email Campaigns (With Examples)
• 6 Tips for Effective Email Marketing for eCommerce

What Is eCommerce Email Marketing?

Ecommerce email marketing is a pivotal marketing tactic used by online stores to promote their brand to potential and existing customers.

Email marketing for eCommerce is often used to:

• Nurture new leads toward making their first purchase
• Keep existing customers thinking about your brand
• Promote specific products, sales, and special offers
• Encourage customer engagement

Why email marketing is important for eCommerce?

The average email marketing ROI (return on investment) is 45:1 for eCommerce, retail, & consumer goods brands.

That means eCommerce businesses can potentially earn $45 for every $1 invested. So if you want to grow your online store, you must create and optimize an email marketing strategy.

10 Types of eCommerce Email Marketing Campaigns (With Examples)

A robust eCommerce email marketing strategy should include multiple types of email campaigns. Read through these 10 email types and determine which ones will help you reach your business’s goals.

1. Welcome Email Series

When new subscribers sign up for your eCommerce newsletter, they expect to hear from you.

The best time to reach out to new subscribers is right after they’ve signed up. That’s when they’ll likely be looking for an email from you.

We recommend sending a welcome email series of at least 3 emails so new subscribers can get to know you a little bit before they go onto your regular mailing list. This way, you can show off the value of your email newsletter and set expectations about your relationship.

Does this effort pay off? Yes! In fact, these might be the most important and successful email campaigns you ever send.

Welcome emails have an extremely high average open rate of 55.61%, according to research by Klaviyo.

Klaviyo also found that welcome emails have 4x the click rate and 23x the conversion rate of other marketing emails.

For our first eCommerce email marketing examples, we’ll look at a welcome series from PajamaGram.

First Email
Just after I signed up for their email list, I received this welcome message:

The top section of the email offers a warm welcome and describes the benefits of the brand.

It also delivers on their lead magnet: they offered a $10 coupon in exchange for signing up for their email list. If you use a lead magnet, you should always deliver your promise immediately in that first welcome email.

As I scrolled down, the email campaign explained the benefits of being a subscriber. It also highlighted various product lines, with call-to-action (CTA) buttons to shop each category.

2nd Email

Next, PajamaGram sent me a follow-up email to nudge me about that welcome coupon. The subject line read, “Here’s an Offer You Can’t Refuse!”

This email highlighted a product I had viewed on their website, reminding me that I could use my $10 off to purchase it.

During the first few days after signing up, I received several similar emails that featured different products. Because I signed up the week of Black Friday, I likely received more frequent emails than they normally send to new subscribers.

Final Welcome Series Email

PajamaGram uses the last email in their welcome series to offer customer support to their subscribers, with the subject line “Can We Help You Find Anything?”:

Below the “Get Support” CTA, the email includes their customer service team’s phone number and email address. There’s also another reminder to use the $10 coupon, as well as more featured product categories.

Of course, this is only 1 example of an eCommerce welcome series email campaign. The content, frequency, and number of emails will vary depending on your industry and goals.

Want to see more tips and examples of welcome emails? We’ve got you covered:

Learn MoreHow To Write the Perfect Welcome Email Series (Nail Your First 5 Emails!)

Bonus Tip: If you don’t already have an email marketing service (ESP), we recommend Constant Contact. Constant Contact is beginner-friendly, has excellent support, and is powerful enough to handle the most advanced tasks you can throw at it. That includes the email automation features you’ll need to set up your welcome series of triggered emails.

2. Exclusive Discount or Coupon Emails

The eCommerce email examples above featured a special coupon subscribers received when they sign up for the email list. However, those welcome emails aren’t the only time you should offer exclusive discounts to your subscribers.

You want customers to stay on your email list, so they’ll keep getting your promotional emails.

The best way to retain subscribers is to offer value in your eCommerce email campaigns.

Here’s an email from the clothing retailer Maurices. It offers an exclusive coupon code:

The word “Exclusive” in the subject line informs subscribers that this offer isn’t available to the general public.

The text of the email elaborates on that exclusivity. It says that shoppers must use the coupon code in the email to get the discount when shopping online.

Maurices also has brick-and-mortar stores, and the email states that subscribers must show this email in order to use the coupon in-store.

Exclusive offers increase the value of your email newsletter and entice customers to stay subscribed.

They also earn you more revenue. In an online shopping survey of 1,023 adults, 84% said an exclusive offer makes them likely to shop with a brand.

Here are a few more of the survey’s findings:

• 41% said they would seek out a product to purchase in order to use the exclusive offer.
• 48% said that exclusive offers encourage them to buy something sooner.
• 82% said they’ll shop more often with a brand that provides exclusive offers.

The takeaway? Exclusive coupon emails should be a central part of your eCommerce email marketing efforts.

3. Sales Emails

While your subscribers should definitely get some VIP perks, don’t forget to also tell them about your regular sales.

Here is an email from the home improvement store Lowes:

This email lets subscribers know about a sale on appliances. It provides information on the sale, photos of various appliances, and a CTA button to browse their appliance selection.

Here are 2 more sales email examples. These are from Bath & Body Works and Joann:

The Bath & Body Works email promotes a sale on their fragrance refills. There’s a discount code, but it’s not exclusive to subscribers. In fact, the code was advertised in a floating bar on their website.

However, the brand’s subscribers wouldn’t know about the sale unless they happened to visit the website that day. That’s why it’s important to send notification emails about your sales. Your email subscribers have signed up because they are highly interested in your brand. They want to know about your sales.

The Joann email promotes a sale on a specific brand of art supplies. It informs subscribers that the sale is happening both in-store and online, although the discount is slightly different. No coupon code is required. Subscribers just need to click the “Shop Now” CTA button to start shopping.

Bonus Tip: Pay special attention to your sale emails during seasonal and holiday-themed sale events. Holiday email marketing campaigns are a great way to get the attention of subscribers who haven’t yet taken the step from window-shopper to consumer.

Just look at the entire Black Friday & Cyber Monday phenomenon and the holiday shopping that happens during November and December.

Learn MoreBlack Friday & Cyber Monday Marketing: Week-by-Week Guide

4. Loyalty Program Emails

Keep your most loyal customers coming back to your store again and again with a loyalty program.

A loyalty program allows customers to earn rewards, such as store credit, based on how much they’ve spent with your brand.

BoxLunch has a strong loyalty program that lets shoppers earn store credit to use on future purchases. Users earn points by making purchases, and they receive a $5 reward for every 100 points they earn.

Email marketing is a big part of their rewards program. They use email campaigns to do the following:

• Encourage subscribers to enroll in the loyalty program
• Notify program members of rewards they’ve earned
• Remind them to use those rewards before they expire
• Promote special reward program events, such as double-points days

Here’s an example of a BoxLunch email. It informs the subscriber of rewards money they can use, and it lets them know about a double-points day.

Remember, repeat customers are the bread and butter that will feed your business and help it grow. According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than keeping one you already have.

That’s why customer loyalty programs are such a great investment. They help you keep sales coming in without the cost of attracting new customers to your online store. And email marketing is a vital part of maintaining an effective rewards program and improving your customer retention.

5. Abandoned Cart Emails

Did you know that a staggering 70.19% of online shopping carts are abandoned?

This is according to a report from the Baymard Institute, which compiled data from 49 different cart abandonment studies.

Those are just the facts. But that doesn’t mean that those sales are gone forever.

If you’re collecting email addresses and tracking site usage, the next logical step is sending an abandoned cart email series when shoppers leave without completing their purchases.

Here’s an abandoned cart email example from the 3D printing company Bambu Lab:

This email couldn’t be simpler, but it does the job: it reminds shoppers about the products they showed interest in.

Beneath the full list of products that were left in the user’s cart, there are 2 simple CTAs:

If the shopper doesn’t open or make a purchase from your first cart abandonment email, don’t give up. There are more opportunities to use emails to win that customer back.

One prime opportunity is when an item in their cart goes on sale or is low in stock.

Here’s a cart abandonment email example from Target. It entices customers with the subject line, “There’s a sale in your cart”:

Clicking the “Save now” CTA takes you directly to your cart. If you click on the product image, it’ll take you to the product page.

Learn MoreShopping Cart Abandonment: Definition, Data, & How to Regain Lost Revenue

Bonus Tip: Did you know that you can prevent some of your customers from abandoning their carts in the first place?

With OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® technology, you can create onsite popups that display exactly when a website visitor is trying to exit your checkout or cart pages.

You can use that popup to offer an incentive to complete their purchase, such as a coupon code or free shipping offer.

Here’s an example of an abandoned cart popup that we’ve used on our own checkout page:

Do you want to use exit popups to reduce cart abandonment? Sign up for OptinMonster today!

7. Referral Program Emails

Word-of-mouth marketing is a form of social proof and it’s one of the most powerful marketing methods you can use. This makes a referral program an excellent addition to your marketing toolbox.

With a referral program, your customers become your marketers. They get an incentive to recommend your business to their friends, and those friends get an incentive to make their first purchase from you.

Here’s an example of a referral program email from KiwiCo, an online retailer that sells fun and educational activity kits for children:

The email continues with more details about the program:

This email targets existing customers and encourages them to tell their friends about KiwiCo’s monthly subscription box.

Why is this an effective strategy? Because 83% of Americans say they’re more likely to purchase a product that’s been recommended by a friend or family member.

Referral programs are win-win-win scenario:

• Your existing customer wins by getting a reward.
• Your first time customer wins by getting a discount.
• Your eCommerce brand wins by gaining new customers and revenue.

If you want your referral strategy to be successful, you should promote your program in emails as often as you can. The email example above is dedicated to the referral program, but you should also consider adding information about your program to many or all of your email campaigns.

6. Review and Feedback Request Emails

We talked about social proof earlier, but we’re going to do it again. This time, we’re talking about a specific form of social proof: reviews.

Do you have engaged customers who are buying from your store and clicking on your emails? You can reach out to them directly to ask for a review. The pet supplies retailer Chewy does just that in this example:

If you want to improve your website and user experience (UX), you can also use your eCommerce email marketing to ask for customer feedback. Here’s an example from Walmart:

Since you’re asking your customers to take the time to fill out a survey, offer an incentive if you can. In this case, it’s a chance to win a $1,000 gift card.

8.  New Arrivals/Product Launch Emails

Is your store launching new products that you think you’re subscribers will be excited about? Send them an email to let them know!

Our next eCommerce email marketing example does just that. The Company Store used an email campaign to announce a new product line:

The subject line catches subscribers’ attention with “NEW” in all caps. The email announces a new bedding line in collaboration with Rifle Paper Co., which is known for its floral designs.

As the subscriber scrolls through the email, they see photos of 2 different design lines, with CTAs to shop each one.

Product launch emails not only promote your new arrivals, but they also keep subscribers engaged and excited about your brand.

9. Cross-Sell Emails (a.k.a. Product Recommendations)

I’ve shown you several eCommerce emails that remind customers about products they’ve looked at. You should also be sending recommendations for products similar to what they’ve bought or browsed.

This tactic is called cross-selling. You see cross-selling regularly on websites that have a “People also bought” or “We think you’ll like” section.

And you can use the same tactic in your eCommerce email marketing.

Nintendo sends out cross-selling emails that list the video games the customer has recently purchased or played on their account. For each game, they make a suggestion for a similar game that the player is likely to enjoy:

10. Win-Back Emails

What if you’ve been sending a subscriber all of these great eCommerce marketing emails, but they aren’t opening any of them?

Email them a big incentive to re-engage them with your brand! Even if they don’t make a purchase right away, a “We miss you” email can catch their attention. And it might get them paying attention to your promotional emails again.

Here’s an example of a win-back email from the cosmetics company bareMinerals:

If the subscriber still doesn’t open your re-engagement email campaigns, then it may be time to remove them from your list.

Learn MoreWin-Back Emails: The Ultimate Guide to Re-Engaging Lapsed Customers

6 Tips for Effective Email Marketing for eCommerce

Now that you’ve learned about the different types of emails you should send, let’s take a broader look at some best practices for your eCommerce email marketing strategy.

1. Grow Your Email List

Even the best eCommerce email marketing won’t matter if you don’t have a great email list.

You want as large of a list as possible, of course. But you also want a list full of subscribers who are excited about your brand and products.

That’s where OptinMonster comes in!

OptinMonster is the best lead generation software available. We help businesses create onsite campaigns such as popups, floating bars, and inline forms to collect email addresses across your site.

With our easy drag-and-drop builder and 100+ pre-made templates, you can have an email optin campaign up and running on your site in minutes.

Here’s one of our templates designed to promote your Cyber Monday sale. It informs users about the upcoming sale, and it also offers an extra discount in exchange for the visitor’s email address.

People signing up through this campaign are looking forward to your Cyber Monday deals. That means they’re likely to be engaged subscribers.

OptinMonster also has robust triggering and targeting features, which lets you reach the right people at the right time with your email signup forms.

For instance, you can ask for an email address just as a visitor tries to leave your online store.

Or you can show your popup only after a visitor has spent several minutes on your site. After all, users who are actively engaged with your brand are more likely to want emails from you.

Want to grow your email list? Try OptinMonster!

2. Use Email Segmentation

As you’ve seen above, there are a lot of different types of eCommerce marketing emails, and they all have different goals and audiences.

Not every email you send should go out to your whole list. That’s where email segmentation comes in.

You can segment your list based on a variety of factors:

• Demographics like age and gender identity
• Geolocation (where the subscriber lives)
• Sales funnel position
• Behavior, such as purchase history or email engagement

Segmentation can drastically improve open rates, click-through rates, and engagement while reducing bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports.

That’s because each subscriber is getting the emails that are most relevant to them.

Sending emails with content that’s tailored to each audience segment is a great way to keep your subscribers happy. And subscribers who are happy are more likely to buy.

So, how can you make segmentation part of your eCommerce email marketing strategy?

You’ll need data from your subscribers in order to create audience segments. Thankfully, you can start collecting that data the moment they sign up for your list.

How? With email signup forms from OptinMonster!

OptinMonster integrates with most email marketing software, as well as most eCommerce platforms, so you can use data from OptinMonster to help you segment your lists.

That data can include:

• Which campaign the subscriber signed up through
• How they arrived on your website (Referrer Detection)
• Geolocation
• The options they selected or information they provided in the signup form

Here’s a quick video overview of OptinMonster’s segmentation features:

As you develop your eCommerce email marketing strategy, you’ll segment your list even further than what OptinMonster provides. But when you have some subscriber data from the very beginning, you’ll be off to a great start.

Case StudyHow SnackNation Adds 1200 Segmented Leads Each Week With OptinMonster

3. Create Responsive, Well-Designed Emails

All emails coming from your eCommerce business need to be responsive and well-designed, from welcome emails to coupon emails to transactional emails (such as order confirmation emails).

This doesn’t mean that every email has to have images and GIFs. In fact, text-only emails do really well when they’re interesting.

What this does mean is that your emails need to:

Be Visually Appealing

This can be done with images, yes, but you can also use non-image formatting like headings and bullets to break up text and make your emails easy to read.

Look Good on Mobile

Chances are, your email service provider uses responsive templates that automatically adjust based on the display screen’s size. With Constant Contact, you can preview or send a test email to make sure things look the way you want.

Be Easy to Understand

It’s best to focus on a primary call-to-action in each email, so start out with a plan!

Capture the Reader’s Interest

Never underestimate the power of your words. Start with a hook and make sure your email copy pulls your reader deeper into the email as you go.

Don’t forget that you can also upsell and cross-sell in your emails!

4. Use Email Automation to Follow Up With Leads

Using eCommerce email marketing automation is the best thing you can do to keep your email marketing scalable and consistent without sacrificing relationships.

You can set up automated email campaigns in Constant Contact, or your email service provider of choice, to automatically do cool things like:

• Send a welcome email series to new subscribers
• Send abandoned cart emails to shoppers who didn’t complete their checkout
• Notify customers when an item they looked at or left in their cart goes on sale
• Check in with subscribers who haven’t engaged in a while
• Send out birthday or anniversary emails to celebrate your subscribers
• Promote events or webinars
• Share content

All without losing the personalization that’s so important in building and growing relationships.

Related ContentThe 14 Best Marketing Automation Tools for Your Business

5. Test Your Email Marketing Campaigns

If you want to discover what types of emails work best with your subscribers, you should run some A/B tests, also known as split tests.

If you’re not familiar with split testing, it’s as simple as taking the original version of your email and testing it against another version of your email where you’ve changed a single element, like the call-to-action, subject line, part of the design, or some of the copy.

Your email service provider sends each version of your email to a small percentage of your list. The software tracks which one performs better, and then sends that version out to the rest of your list.

You can easily test your email subject lines in Constant Contact with the click of a button:

Learn MoreHow to Split Test Email Campaigns the RIGHT Way [Ultimate Guide]

6. Track Your Results

To get the best results from your email marketing you need to be monitoring and improving your campaigns.

There are a lot of moving pieces to an email marketing strategy for eCommerce, and there are a lot of metrics to track. These metrics includes:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Bounce rates

Check out our guide, How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Email Campaigns, to learn everything you need to know about maintaining list health and improving the ROI of your campaigns.

Start Sending High-Converting eCommerce Emails Today!

There you have it! Now that you know the main types of eCommerce email campaigns, as well as a few best practices, you should be ready to optimize your own strategy.

For more ideas to boost your eCommerce revenue, check out these resources:

• The Ultimate eCommerce Optimization Guide: 13 Steps to Instantly Boost Revenue
• eCommerce Best Practices: Set up Your Business for Success
• How to Write a Business Plan for eCommerce Success
• eCommerce Statistics: Key Insights Every Business Should Know 

And of course, the first step to email marketing is building your list. You can do that with OptinMonster, with or without an email marketing service. OptinMonster comes with Monster Leads to safely store your subscriber information right in your OptinMonster dashboard until you’ve decided on the right email marketing service for you.

And once you’re up and running, you’ll be able to continually grow your email list, so your eCommerce email campaigns will reach even more potential customers.

OptinMonster pricing starts at just $9 a month, and we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee. So while there’s no risk to try it, but there’s a ton of exciting potential for your eCommerce business.

I’ve worked in email marketing for over 15 years, and because of that, I pay close attention to the marketing emails that land in my inbox. In addition to the standard gift guides and promotional emails, many brands send special holiday greetings to nurture their customer relationships.

Sometimes, these campaigns are simple email greeting cards, similar to the Christmas holiday mail that customers receive. But often, they combine a heartfelt message with a call-to-action (CTA) or special offer.

In this post, I’ll share 4 of my favorite holiday email examples and discuss why they work. Then, I’ll share 6 holiday email templates, providing templates for both copywriting and design.

• Benefits of Holiday Emails (Boost Sales & Trust)
• 4 Holiday Email Examples to Inspire Your Campaigns
• 6 Holiday Email Templates for Copywriting & Design
• Build Your Email List With Holiday-Themed Optin Campaigns

Benefits of Holiday Emails (Boost Sales & Trust)

Sending dedicated holiday messages offers several advantages for businesses and nonprofits:

Strengthen Customer Relationships

When you send emails for special celebrations, you get to connect with your customers outside of your normal notifications about sales, new products, and limited-time offers. Holiday messages provide an opportunity to express gratitude and connect on a personal level, fostering loyalty and goodwill.

That increased trust can keep your customers coming back year-round, even after the holiday shopping season is over.

Increase Your Holiday Sales

In 2023, online retail sales during the winter holiday season approached $254 billion in the U.S. alone.

You already know that special offers and discounts drive sales for any holiday promotion, whether it’s Cyber Monday or Father’s Day. When you send dedicated emails to celebrate the holiday, you can attract more attention to your promotions.

Enhance Brand Visibility

Consistent and festive email campaigns help keep your brand top-of-mind, making it more likely customers will choose your products or services.

For instance, you probably don’t expect your customers to do a lot of shopping on Christmas Day. However, you can still send a Christmas greeting email to remind them about your company and create happy feelings about your brand.

Showcase Holiday Spirit

Let’s build on that “happy feelings” idea. Holiday greetings and seasonal content demonstrate your organization’s festive spirit. They highlight your brand’s personality and values, creating a more relatable and engaging image for your audience. This approach enhances customer perception and strengthens emotional connections.

In short, holiday email campaigns are important tools in your email marketing strategy, as they create positive associations for your brand and encourage customers to keep shopping with you.

4 Holiday Email Examples to Inspire Your Campaigns

Below, I’m going to share a few holiday emails that caught my eye when they landed in my inbox. I’ll discuss why I like them and what you can learn from them.

These are all emails that I received on Christmas Day of 2023. While Christmas isn’t the only day you can or should send holiday emails, I’ve chosen these because they show how to really focus on the greeting before making any sales pitch.

1. The Company Store: Christmas Day Greeting + Sale & Product Links

On Christmas morning, I received an email from The Company Store, an online retailer that specializes in cozy home products such as bedding, towels, and pajamas. The email began with a digital Christmas card:

Below, they linked to the final day of their End of Season sale, along with some product recommendations:

Why this Christmas email works: This email focuses all on heart and brand image, which is a good idea for a Christmas morning email. Phrases like “cozy little holiday” and “there’s no place like home” are perfectly on-brand, while not demanding anything of the customer.

Yes, they include some sale and product links at the bottom of the email, but the overall vibe is relaxing.

What you can learn: Blend the voice and brand of your company with the festive feel of the holiday you’re celebrating. That way, you can leave a real impression about who you are as a company.

2. Hispanic Federation: A Nonprofit Thank You & Overview

Here’s another holiday email example from Hispanic Federation, a cultural nonprofit organization.

The email included a festive graphic and a simple letter from the organization’s president. It thanked donors for their generosity and gave a brief list of what the organization had accomplished because of that financial support. It’s not shown in the screenshot above, but there was a donate button below the letter.

Why this holiday email works: Hispanic Federation doesn’t bother with any fancy design. They just thank their donors and wish them well for the holiday season. By listing some of the work they do, they make supporters feel good about their donations, which will encourage them to donate again in the future.

What you can learn: Whether you’re a nonprofit or a company, put your subscribers first in your holiday emails. Thank them and let them know how much you appreciate their support.

3. Chewy: Special Holiday Content

Chewy is an online pet supplies store, and they sent me a special gift in their Christmas morning email:

Chewy sent out a link to a fully illustrated story about a stray cat who finds a home for Christmas. The story has a strong focus on helping homeless animals and includes a link to donate to local shelters.

Why this email works: Chewy really went above and beyond to create a special experience their customers won’t forget. They even included a video of the story being read aloud in front of a crackling fire! The company is known for this kind of effort. In fact, I first heard about them because they send some of their customers original paintings of their pets. This lovely story only adds to the warm feelings toward the brand.

What you can learn: You may not have the resources to create an illustrated story and video. However, if your company does content marketing, consider creating themed content that you can include in your holiday emails.

4. DigitalMarketer: A Final Holiday Deal

On Christmas Day, DigitalMarketer sent out an email reminding subscribers about a deal they were offering as part of their 12 Days of Deals holiday promotion. However, they didn’t jump right into a sales pitch. Instead, they started their email with a silly photo of an Elf on the Shelf toy sitting inside their logo at their headquarters. They also shared gratitude and well wishes before offering their final deal.

Why this holiday email works: This was a pretty standard email from DigitalMarketer, but they made it fun and festive for the holiday.

What you can learn: You don’t have to use a special template or spend a ton of time sending a dedicated holiday email. You can always simply add an attention-catching image and some warm holiday wishes to a regular email.

6 Holiday Email Templates for Copywriting & Design

Ready to start preparing great holiday emails like the ones above? The templates below will help you create festive campaigns that will charm subscribers and build your business’s reputation. This section will include:

1. Copywriting templates that I’ve created to help you expedite your holiday email writing process
2. Holiday email design templates that I’ve curated from various email marketing and design platforms

Let’s get started!

1. Season’s Greetings & Thank You Copywriting Template

First, here’s a very standard template for an email featuring a holiday letter. The wording here is generic, so you should customize it to your brand voice and industry.

Email Subject Line: “Warm Holiday Wishes from [Your Brand]”

Email Header:

• Header Image: [Holiday Graphic or Photo]
• Introduction: “Happy Holidays from all of us at [Your Brand]! As the year comes to a close, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks for your continued support.”

Message:

• Greeting: “Dear [Customer Name],”
• Gratitude: “We appreciate your trust in us and are grateful for the opportunity to serve you.”
• Special Offer: “As a thank you, please enjoy [hyperlinked special offer or discount]. “
• Season’s Greetings: “May your holiday season be filled with joy, peace, and happiness. We look forward to continuing our journey together in the coming year.”

Closing:

• Holiday Wishes: “Warmest regards,”
• Signature: “[Name, Title]”

Calls-to-Action:

• Sale link: Include a linked image or text to your current promotion.
• Recommended products: Include a gallery of products the customer might be interested in.

2. End-of-Year Nonprofit Recap (Design Template)

The changing of the year is a great time to look back at everything you’ve accomplished over the past 12 months. If you’re a nonprofit, your supporters want to hear about your success, too!

The email marketing platform Campaign Monitor offers this template among its free holiday email templates:

This New Year email template begins by celebrating the past year and introducing the idea of sharing the organization’s achievements. Then, there’s a long color-blocked infographic listing top statistics from the year:

Finally, there’s a CTA reminding subscribers that there’s still time to give before the year comes to a close:

3. Mother’s Day Email with Special Deals (Copywriting Template)

A lot of this article has focused on the winter holidays, but you can and should send emails to celebrate a wide variety of special occasions. Here is some sample copy to use for a Mother’s Day email.

Email Subject Line: “Celebrate Mother’s Day with [Your Brand] – Special Offers Inside!”

Email Header:

• Header Image: [Image of a mother and child enjoying your products]
• Introduction: “Celebrating All Moms!”

Message:

• Greeting: “Dear [Customer Name],”
• Celebrate Other Moms: “Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and we want to help you celebrate the incredible moms in your life. Whether you’re shopping for your mom, grandmother, or a special mother figure, we have the perfect gifts to show your appreciation.”
• Celebrate Yourself: “And if you’re a mom, we want to celebrate you, too! Thank you for bringing life and love into the world. We hope you use the deals below to treat yourself to something special.“

Special Offers:

• Exclusive Discount: “Enjoy 20% off on all Mother’s Day gifts with code MOTHER20.”
• Gift Ideas: “Check out our top picks for Mother’s Day, including [Product 1], [Product 2], and [Product 3].”
• Free Shipping: “Get free shipping on orders over $50.”

Call-to-Action: “Shop Our Mother’s Day Collection”

Personal Touch: “Make this Mother’s Day unforgettable with a personalized gift. Add a custom message to your purchase to show how much you care.”

4. Hanukkah Email (Design Template)

This free holiday email template from ReallyGoodEmails helps you send an inspiring Hanukkah message to your subscribers:

Below the main image and message, the template includes “8 Ways to Spread Light This Season.”

4. Festive Christmas Email (Design Template)

The popular design software Canva has a wide variety of email templates you can access even with a free account, including this jolly template for a Christmas email:

The existing text on this Christmas email template is for a personal grooming company, but you can easily change it out to create a fun holiday greeting for your business or organization.

5. International Friendship Day Email (Copywriting Template)

The big holidays aren’t the only occasions to reach out to your email subscribers with a special message. Look for smaller celebratory days, especially if they’re relevant to your business.

International Friendship Day, which is on July 30, is an example of a holiday that any email marketer can celebrate. You can use it as an opportunity to honor your relationships with your customers, readers, clients, or supporters.

Email Subject Line: “For Our Friends on this Friendship Day”

Email Header:

• Header Image: [Photo or graphic of friends laughing or hugging]
• Introduction: “Happy International Friendship Day from all of us at [Your Brand]!“

Message:

• Greeting: “Dear [Customer Name],”
• Gratitude: Friendships are bonds that carry us through hard times and make the best times feel even sweeter. If you’re taking the time to read this, we don’t see you as just another customer. We see you as a valued friend.
• Special Offer: “We want to show our appreciation by giving you [special offer]. Think of it as a small gift to you, or use it to treat a special friend in your life.

Closing: “Your friend, [Name, Title]

Call-to-Action: Links or buttons to current sales or deals.

6. Chinese New Year Email With Coupon Code (Design Template)

Constant Contact is a leader in the email marketing field. In fact, it’s our top recommendation for email marketing services for small businesses. Constant Contact users have access to hundreds of templates, including this one for Chinese New Year. After all, January 1 isn’t the only time to say “Happy New Year!”

This template doesn’t include an in-depth message, but you could easily add one by dragging and dropping a text box above the coupon code.

Build Your Email List With Holiday-Themed Optin Campaigns

After reading this article, I hope that you feel ready to use these holiday email templates and examples to create warm and festive messages to nurture your customers and subscribers.

But even the best emails can’t help your business if you don’t have a great email list full of engaged leads.

That’s where OptinMonster comes in!

OptinMonster is the best lead-generation software available, and our popups, floating bars, and other onsite marketing campaigns help you build a high-quality email list quickly.

We have 700+ pre-designed templates, including dozens for different holidays, including Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Holi, Thanksgiving, and many more. You can customize each template for your business with just a few clicks in our drag-and-drop builder.

Then, you can use our robust targeting and triggering rules to show your campaigns to the right people at the right time. OptinMonster’s software is so easy to use that you can have a campaign up and running on your site in mere minutes.

Related Resources:

• Black Friday Email: Best Examples, Top Subject Lines, and Key Takeaways
• Email Copywriting That Sells: 17 Simple Ways to Writer Better Marketing Emails
• 40 Merry and Bright Holiday Marketing Design Examples
• How to Optimize Your Site for a Successful Holiday eCommerce Season